Orientalist historiography equates all change with Westernization and erases anti-colonial resistance

Evidence

The Central Islamic lands are defined as excluding North Africa and Andalusia, and their history is an orderly march from the past till modern times. In volume 1, therefore, Islam is a geographical designation applied chronologically and selectively as it suits the experts. But nowhere in the chapters on classical Islam is there an adequate preparation for the disappointments in store for us when we come to “recent times,” as they are called. The chapter on the modern Arab lands is written without the slightest understanding of the revolutionary developments in the area. The author takes a schoolmarmish, openly reactionary attitude towards the Arabs (“it must be said that during this period the educated and uneducated youth of the Arab countries, with their enthusiasm and idealism, became a fertile soil for political exploitation and, at times, perhaps without realizing it, the tools of unscrupulous extremists and agitators”127), tempered by occasional praise of Lebanese nationalism (although we are never told that the appeal of fascism to a small number of Arabs during the thirties also infected the Lebanese Maronites, who in 1936 founded the Falanges libanaises as a copy of Mussolini’s Black Shirts). “Unrest and agitation” are ascribed to 1936 without a mention of Zionism, and the very notions of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are never allowed to violate the serenity of the narrative. As for the chapters on “the political impact of the West” and “economic and social change”—ideas left no more specific than that—they are tacked on as reluctant concessions to Islam as having something to do with “our” world in general. Change is unilaterally equated with modernization, even though it is nowhere made clear why other kinds of change need be so imperiously dismissed. Since it is assumed that Islam’s only worthwhile relations have been with the West, the importance of Bandung or of Africa or of the Third World generally is ignored; this blithe indifference to a good three-quarters of reality somewhat explains the amazingly cheerful statement that “the historical ground has been cleared [by whom, for what, in what way?] for a new relationship between the West and Islam … based on equality and cooperation.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768

Categorization

• XREF: Change-unilaterally-equals-modernization is a scaffold concept for later Islamophobia readings on how movements like political Islam get framed as anti-modernity rather than anti-colonial. — connects to: Orientalism’s totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation; Orientalism’s totalizing victim narrative erases home-country wrongs and oppositional histories like Marxism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 817; Resistance to Western influence was pathologized as laggard traditionalism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 250 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768