Islam has remained a dominant force in Middle Eastern life

Evidence

Since he hated religion in all its forms, he was unable to accept that Islam has really been important in determining the shape of Arabculture, in the same way that Christianity has been important in the shaping of Europe and America. Said seemed to believe that when people were talking about religion, they were really talking about something else. Of course, as we have seen, certain Orientalists did go too far in talking about the Islamic city, the Islamic mind and so forth. In the nineteenth century, religion played such a large part in shaping Western culture (think of Matthew Arnold, Ernest Renan, Fyodor Dostoevsky and so many others) that some Orientalists may have overstressed the importance of religion in Middle Eastern culture and society. But Islam has been and remains a dominant feature in Middle Eastern life, affecting or at times even determining law, the educational curriculum, the rhythm of the working week, women’s dress and other matters in the region. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 528

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADEN-DUM ‘sacrifice’ article’s premise that scholars can underrate religion’s structural role, and to the reader’s general interest in religion as infrastructure of culture.

Related

• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.84)
• Western study of Islamic texts long ignored living Muslims and their culture (similarity 0.83)
• Arab and Islamic studies resisted the 1960s scholarly revolutions that revised other area studies (similarity 0.82)
• Islam served as Europe’s principal civilizational other for centuries. (similarity 0.82)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.82)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.81)
• Even sympathetic European scholarship ignored Islam’s living devotional spirituality (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist histories reduce Islam to dynastic chronology while bypassing belief (similarity 0.81)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.81)
• Modern secular authorities have displaced Islam as the arbiter of Muslim social life (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.81)
• Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels. (similarity 0.81)
• Europe’s image of Islam tracked its political and military needs, not theology (similarity 0.80)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.80)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.80)