Modernization theory treated Islam as a timeless childish civilization needing rescue.
Evidence
Among the many illusions that persisted in modernization theory was one that seemed to have a special pertinence to the Islamic world: namely, that before the advent of the United States, Islam existed in a kind of timeless childhood, shielded from true development by an archaic set of superstitions, prevented by its strange priests and scribes from moving out of the Middle Ages into the modern world. At this point, Orientalism and modernization theory dovetail nicely. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 154
Categorization
- DEFINE: Captures the core premise that Orientalism and modernization theory merged in portraying Islam as stagnant pre-modernity.
Related
- Premodern Islam was ordinary; modern Europe is the historical exception (similarity 0.84)
- Modern secular authorities have displaced Islam as the arbiter of Muslim social life (similarity 0.82)
- Modernist dogma assumes no modern form can be inferior to a premodern one (similarity 0.82)
- Arab and Islamic studies resisted the 1960s scholarly revolutions that revised other area studies (similarity 0.82)
- The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.81)
- Modern Orientalist knowledge descends from secularized Christian supernaturalism, not objective discovery (similarity 0.81)
- Postwar US empire was legitimated through modernization theory and Orientalism (similarity 0.81)
- Modernization theory framed imperial intervention as benevolent external uplift (similarity 0.81)
- Orientalist philology reduced Muslims to a fixed subspecies outside modernity (similarity 0.81)
- No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.81)
- Islam as a generic category is a modern, reductive translation of heterogeneous historical formations. (similarity 0.81)
- Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.80)
- Said’s static-views claim nullifies Orientalism’s own historical impact (similarity 0.80)
- Modern Orientalism secularized inherited Christian structures rather than gaining objective knowledge (similarity 0.80)
- The dangerous-medieval-Islam idea entered the cultural canon as orthodoxy (similarity 0.80)