Orientalist scholars cast Islam as a religion of resistance defined against Christianity

Evidence

Massignon took as his starting point the existence of the three Abrahamanic religions, of which Islam is the religion of Ishmael, the monotheism of a people excluded from the divine promise made to Isaac. Islam is therefore a religion of resistance (to God the Father, to Christ the Incarnation), which yet keeps within it the sadness that began in Hagar’s tears. Arabic as a result is the very language of tears, just as the whole notion of jihad in Islam (which Massignon explicitly says is the epic form in Islam that Renan could not see or understand) has an important intellectual dimension whose mission is war against Christianity and Judaism as exterior enemies, and against heresy as an interior enemy. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 688

Categorization

• XREF: This is exactly the construction-of-the-Other mechanism the reader is extracting for the Islamophobia toolkit — Islam defined negatively against Christian promise.
• DEFINE: Defines how the binary Arab/Semitic exotic scholarly tradition (Massignon) positions Islam as ‘religion of resistance,’ a template reused in later Islamophobia discourse.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 688