Orientalist psychological profiling reduces a whole culture to a fixed set of traits.

Evidence

Thus for his four-page, double-columned psychological portrait of over 100 million people, considered for a period of 1,300 years, Glidden cites exactly four sources for his views: a recent book on Tripoli, one issue of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, the periodical Oriente Moderno, and a book by Majid Khadduri, a well-known Orientalist. The article itself purports to uncover “the inner workings of Arab behavior,” which from our point of view is “aberrant” but for Arabs is “normal.” After this auspicious start, we are told that Arabs stress conformity; that Arabs inhabit a shame culture whose “prestige system” involves the ability to attract followers and clients (as an aside we are told that “Arab society is and always has been based on a system of client-patron relationships”); that Arabs can function only in conflict situations; that prestige is based solely on the ability to dominate others; that a shame culture—and therefore Islam itself—makes a virtue of revenge (here Glidden triumphantly cites the June 29, 1970 Ahram to show that “in 1969 [in Egypt] in 1070 cases of murder where the perpetrators were apprehended, it was found that 20 percent of the murders were based on a desire to wipe out shame, 30 percent on a desire to satisfy real or imaginary wrongs, and 31 percent on a desire for blood revenge”); that if from a Western point of view “the only rational thing for the Arabs to do is to make peace … for the Arabs the situation is not governed by this kind of logic, for objectivity is not a value in the Arab system.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 144

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘shame culture’ / ‘free-floating hostility’ psychologizing of Arabs is a direct antecedent of the essentialized stereotypes modern Islamophobia scholarship evaluates.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 144