Medieval Christian anti-Muslim discourse preceded Said’s orientalism by centuries

Evidence

Orientalism as discourse, for Said, is the ideological counterpart to the political and military realities of British and French empires in the Near East: orientalism provides justification for empire. In the same way, from the seventh century to the thirteenth, anti-Muslim discourse by Christian authors is used to authorize and justify military action, legal segregation, and social repression of Muslims. This is not to say that Said’s schema can be unproblematically transferred back six or ten centuries: during much of the Middle Ages, Europe was in a position of military, economic, and intellectual inferiority to the Muslim world; nineteenth-century Europeans were convinced of their superiority. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s Said/Anidjar claims about orientalism by pushing the genealogy seven centuries back, while flagging the power-asymmetry caveat that distinguishes medieval polemic from modern colonial orientalism.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the Islam-West opposition genealogy mapped in the vault by showing anti-Muslim discourse functioned as ideological justification well before empire — a crucial complication to the Said-derived claims already held.