Orientalist etymology reduces Arab political action to neurotic sexuality

Evidence

Lewis’s association of thawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most part it is a “bad” sexuality he ascribes to the Arab. In the end, since Arabs are really not equipped for serious action, their sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel’s rising up. Instead of revolution there is sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty, and more excitement, which is as much as saying that instead of copulation the Arab can only achieve foreplay, masturbation, coitus interruptus. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 800

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Said’s framework of Orientalist sexuality as a form of control/othering, and to the later Islamophobia readings on how the ‘Orient’ is feminized and pathological.
• DEFINE: Illustrates how philological ‘scholarship’ functions ideologically to strip political agency from the colonized subject.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 800