Islam was reframed as a rival political civilization to justify imperial violence

Evidence

Islam was more than just a religion, and more often, in the minds of Orientalists, not a religion. Rather, oldand especially new-guard Orientalists framed it as a competing political system—a totalitarian system made in the mirror image of the West, or what Said labeled the “Occident.” Islam, therefore, was a rival “civilization” mangled by Western hands to facilitate their imperial ambitions and justify the violence they inflicted on masses of Muslims who—far from the shores of Europe—were painted as imminent threats. The imminence was not physical or even geographic, but tied to memory and lucid in the imagination; namely, the memory of those old and original Crusades, always present in the collective psyche of Europe, and later, the United States. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 272

Categorization

• XREF: The memory-of-the-Crusades point ties directly to the book’s title thesis and connects to the reader’s war-on-terror reading alongside Iftikhar. — connects to: The Islam-is-violent frame deflects attention from empire’s violence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 345; Religious war imagery about Islam is revived for specific imperial needs; Liberal societies displace their imperial violence onto Muslims’ supposed inherent nature. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 355
• CANDY: The reframing of a religion into a mirror-image ‘totalitarian’ civilization is a compact, quotable idea.