Orientalist doctrine attributes untruthfulness to a racialized Oriental mind

Evidence

Starting from this idea that Muslims are a race, Orientalists claimed to be able to explain the “Muslim mind” or the “Arab mind.” Because race-based theories assume that the members of a race are all alike, scholars within this tradition could make sweeping generalizations about how Muslims think and behave. Most of all, the “Muslim mind” was disparaged; as the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind. And even if you do, it won’t be worth the toil.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 126 (#expands, via linked claim)

“Orientalists divided human societies into civilizations that have a core set of values that drive their progress (or lack thereof). The people who inhabit these civilizations were said to have a cultural ‘essence’ that explains who they are across time. Essentialism of this sort is one of the pillars of race making.” Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years after 9/11 (Verso, 2021), 19. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1277 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist truth about racial difference was radical and ineradicable; Twentieth-century intellectuals attributed laziness, mysticism, and statelessness to Orientals en masse; Four persistent dogmas structure orientalist study of Arabs and Islam (+11 more)

Related

• Orientalist truth about racial difference was radical and ineradicable (similarity 0.92)
• Orientalist dissenters defended Islam’s internal diversity against essentializing stereotypes (similarity 0.92)
• Racial homogeneity assumptions enabled sweeping claims about the ‘Muslim mind’ (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalist scholarship conflates Muslims and Jews into one racial type (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism imagined Muslims as a monolithic Arab or Middle Eastern racial bloc. (similarity 0.90)
• Said persistently conflates claims about the essence of Oriental racial identity with claims about the essence of Islamic religious doctrine, so a critique of racial essentialism does not easily… (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalist civilizational essentialism is a pillar of race making (similarity 0.87)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.87)
• Even anti-racist Orientalists held fixed cultural essences for the racialized (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalist scholarship varied internally but shared the racial category (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.86)
• Philological reduction of language legitimates claims connecting race to mind and character. (similarity 0.86)
• Institutional Orientalism rests on four interlocking civilizational assumptions about stagnant Eastern societies (similarity 0.86)
• American officials read educated Muslims as a racially distinct civilized breed apart. (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Racial homogeneity assumptions enabled sweeping claims about the ‘Muslim mind’ #expands (0.90) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 126
• Orientalist civilizational essentialism is a pillar of race making #expands (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1277
• Orientalist representation is a closed, self-reinforcing system immune to empirical data #corroborates (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 188
• Orientalism’s paradigms confirm rather than contest imperial domination #corroborates (0.75)