Nineteenth-century Europeans racialized Shi’ism as Aryan resurgence against Semitic Islam

Evidence

For at least a millennium, Iran has been associated with Islam, and in the more recent centuries with Shi’ite Islam, which some have seen as an expression, a reappearance of the Persian national genius in an Islamic disguise. Some have gone even further—nineteenth-century European writers like Gobineau claimed to see the triumph of Shi’ism as the resurgence of the Aryanism of Iran against the Semitism of Islam. Such ideas are rather discredited nowadays, though they were popular at one time, and still have their adherents. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Gobineau’s racial reading of Shi’ism is a direct data point for the Said-adjacent Orientalist knowledge-production cluster this book feeds.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing where Gobineau’s Aryan-vs-Semite framing of Shi’ism still circulates today.