Islam is integral to but not definitive of Muslim literary cultures

Evidence

When it comes to the literary works from Muslim lands of the past 1400 years, Islam is of course integral to their worldliness and idiomaticity but by no stretch of imagination definitive to them. The parochial triumphalism at the heart of American imperialism today, however, has advanced an imperial nativism that regards the cultures it faces (as friend or foe) as native, nativist, and—the instant it sees them at odds with its own universalizing nativism—peripheral. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 423

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Said’s Orientalism thesis and the base/superstructure question in postcolonial studies.

Related

• Orientalism reduced multifaceted Muslim societies to a single doctrinal Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Radical and subversive thought has always been integral to Islamic history (similarity 0.80)
• The Orientalist project reduced Muslim societies to Islam and Islam to Shari’ah (similarity 0.80)
• Islamic civilization sustained vibrant internal doctrinal contestation and humanism. (similarity 0.80)
• Literature resists Islamophobic universalism by structuring feeling and imagining alternative experiences (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.80)
• Teaching literature historically consolidated British and American imperial power (similarity 0.80)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.79)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.79)
• Racialized ‘national mind’ discourse survives only for Islam and Arabs (similarity 0.79)
• Islamization flowed from the cultural realm into social and political spheres. (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic intellectual history already contains every claim native informers recycle as new (similarity 0.79)