India’s political collapse bred European contempt, unlike Islam’s defiance which bred fear.

Evidence

For there was always India, where, after Portugal pioneered the first bases of European presence in the early sixteenth century, Europe, and primarily England after a long period (from 1600 to 1758) of essentially commercial activity, dominated politically as an occupying force. Yet India itself never provided an indigenous threat to Europe. Rather it was because native authority crumbled there and opened the land to inter-European rivalry and to outright European political control that the Indian Orient could be treated by Europe with such proprietary hauteur—never with the sense of danger reserved for Islam. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 197

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Contrast between hauteur toward the crumbling Indian Orient and danger reserved for Islam — the affective asymmetry that later Orientalism critiques build on.

Related

• European encroachment boosted Orientalism’s confidence while draining its originality (similarity 0.81)
• Islam was the only part of the Orient that truly challenged European domination (similarity 0.80)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists deny the Orient any positive political desire or agency (similarity 0.80)
• European study of Islam originates in fear, not curiosity, and that hostility persists today. (similarity 0.80)
• Culture, not merely power, dynamically created Western interest in the Orient (similarity 0.80)
• Europe’s route to Indian riches necessarily crossed the Islamic world (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s survey concentrated on British and French varieties of Orientalism that supported the British and French Empires as commercial enterprises constructed from colonialism. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism is a political doctrine arising from Western dominance (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Othering and essentialism predate and exceed Europe; colonial capitalism gave them world-historical force (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s Orientalism changed the meaning of ‘Orientalism’ from benevolent human interest in the East to an apparatus of knowledge and writing aligned with western imperial power. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalization results from power and domination, not merely imaginative necessity (similarity 0.79)
• Islamophobia is rooted in imperialism and Orientalism; Western conceptions of Muslims as inferior beings arose when European nations were positioned to dominate once-powerful Muslim empires. (similarity 0.79)
• European Orientalism was normalized into a coherent US scholarly consensus (similarity 0.79)