Islam is portrayed as an unchanging mass phenomenon driven by irrational hatreds

Evidence

Lewis’s polemical, not scholarly, purpose is to show, here and elsewhere, that Islam is an anti-Semitic ideology, not merely a religion. He has a little logical difficulty in trying to assert that Islam is a fearful mass phenomenon and at the same time “not genuinely popular,” but this problem does not detain him long. As the second version of his tendentious anecdote shows, he goes on to proclaim that Islam is an irrational herd or mass phenomenon, ruling Muslims by passions, instincts, and unreflecting hatreds. The whole point of his exposition is to frighten his audience, to make it never yield an inch to Islam. According to Lewis, Islam does not develop, and neither do Muslims; they merely are, and they are to be watched, on account of that pure essence of theirs (according to Lewis), which happens to include a long-standing hatred of Christians and Jews. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 807

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the Orientalist tactic of positing a fixed ‘pure essence’ for a civilization that never develops — a core mechanism carried toward later Islamophobia readings.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters on how Orientalism posits a static, essentialist Orient that cannot change — the same structure Said has been documenting throughout.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 807