Orientalist intellectuals flattened a diverse billion-person faith into one reductive system

Evidence

In 1994, seven years before the War on Terror, Said made perfect sense of a world marred by it. In Representations of the Intellectual, a collection of masterful speeches Said delivered in London, he stated, “Dealing with the Islamic world—all one billion [plus] people in it, with dozens of different societies, half a dozen major languages including Arabic, Turkish, Iranian, [and English], all spread out over about a third of the globe—American or British academic intellectuals speak reductively … irresponsibly of something called ‘Islam.’ ” These European and American voices, which Said labeled “Orientalists,” flattened Islam into a singular system, a solitary whole stripped of any complexity or heterogeneity. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Said’s Orientalism, which the reader likely knows; also pairs with Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis that Beydoun critiques nearby.
• DEFINE: Establishes Beydoun’s operative use of ‘Orientalist’ via Said’s own 1994 formulation — the load-bearing definition for the whole chapter’s argument.