Orientalist historiography reduces Islam to dynastic chronology while omitting its religious and doctrinal substance.

Evidence

But what can one fairly say of a history of Islam, defined by P. M. Holt’s introduction rather airily as a “cultural synthesis,” that proceeds directly from pre-Islamic Arabia to a chapter on Mohammed, then to a chapter on the Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates, and entirely bypasses any account of Islam as a system of belief, faith, or doctrine? For hundreds of pages in volume 1, Islam is understood to mean an unrelieved chronology of battles, reigns, and deaths, rises and heydays, comings and passings, written for the most part in a ghastly monotone. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 766

Categorization

• XREF: The erasure of belief in favor of political events is a representational move parallel to later Islamophobia work on how Muslim religiosity is flattened into threat or political category.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how canonical institutional texts (encyclopedias, reference works) shape what a field considers ‘knowledge’ simply by what they include and omit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 766