National state forms cannot explain Middle East popular movements.

Evidence

Even where they are taking root they are still tender, immature, and precarious. They do not yet correspond to the feelings and loyalties of the great mass of the population; they cannot adequately express the instinctive and spontaneous responses even of the educated elite to the challenges of internal and international affairs. They cannot therefore provide us with a key to the understanding of those movements and policies in the Middle East that are due not to the calculations of groups or individuals, but to a real upsurge of popular sentiment and emotion. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1171

Categorization

• QUESTION: Lewis’s epistemic warning — that surface state politics can’t index deep Muslim sentiment — is exactly the move critics later read as essentializing ‘the Muslim masses.’ Worth weighing how this authorizes the very Orientalism Said critiques.