Europeans’ sense of superiority over Muslims shifted from religious to cultural grounds across centuries

Evidence

One could retort that the same is true about Muslim attitudes toward Christianity or about Arab attitudes toward the West. True enough, but that is not the subject of this book. A sentiment of Western superiority over Muslims and over Arabs runs deep in European and North American culture: this sentiment has its roots in the Middle Ages. “Roots” is a deliberately vague term: I do not mean to suggest that twentieth-century Europeans and North Americans have passively inherited a prejudice that has remained unchanged since the thirteenth century. Thirteenth-century Europeans defined their perceived “superiority” primarily as religious (though cultural and other concerns were inseparable from religion); their twentieth-century counterparts tend to see themselves as culturally or intellectually superior: more “enlightened,” more technologically advanced, and so on. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the general thesis of how colonial/medieval attitudes are continuous yet transformed. — connects to: Eighteenth-century Europeans ranked Islam as a civilization on par with Christendom; Renaissance-era Arabic scholarship in Europe cast Islam more sympathetically than the Crusades had — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 108; Even early European colonizers ranked Muslim Africans above pagan ones — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 130
• QUESTION: The author asserts continuity of a ‘sentiment’ of superiority but carefully hedges transformation — worth chasing what mechanisms transmit such attitudes across seven centuries.