Mainstream American intellectual elites diffusely shared bin Laden’s civilizational framing of Muslims

Evidence

Bin Laden’s clash of civilizations worldview was shared by conservative American elites. Weeks after the Gulf War, Bernard Lewis, a British Orientalist teaching at Princeton, published his influential article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in the widely read Atlantic magazine. Lewis argued that Muslims’ opposition to America was symptomatic of Islam’s purported enmity for secularism and modernity. Muslims’ political grievances were categorically attributed to Islamic fundamentalism—an irrational fusion of religion with politics that could not be reasoned with. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 693

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how a US establishment scholar (Lewis) and a jihadi ideologue converged on the same civilizational binary, and what that mirroring does to public discourse.
• XREF: Connects to the memory of the Civil Rights-era framing of Muslims and the broader literature on orientalism (Said’s critique of Lewis).