Orientalist philology reduced Muslims to a fixed subspecies outside modernity

Evidence

Homo islamicus (the “Islamic man”) and “the Muslim mind” are examples of the fictions that established Occidental superiority. Texts served as the foundation of early Orientalist scholarship. “The essential characteristics of the members of the subspecies could be identified by the use of philological methods to study certain key texts which were regarded as embodying the core principles of Islamic civilization.” Such a process established the Muslim as a subject, rather than a human individual, formulating a character stuck in arrested development and incapable, unlike the white man, of adapting to modernity. This allowed the placement of Muslims in a time and space removed from the West’s normative human community, which had progressed forward, unlike the legions stuck in the Islamic world. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 42

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘homo islamicus’ and ‘the Muslim mind’ as fictions fabricated to establish Western superiority.
• XREF: The arrested-development and time-displacement theme parallels Edward Said’s critique and also the Frankfurt School’s reading of how colonial/racial taxonomies freeze the Other outside historicity.