Orientalist scholarship framed revolution as pathology attacking human nature.

Evidence

Committed as it is to a methodical metastasis, revolutionary ideology demands fanaticism from its adherents. Politics for the revolutionary is not only a question of belief, or a substitute for religious belief. It must stop being what it has always been, namely, an adaptive activity in time for survival. Metastatic, soteriological politics abhors adaptiveness, for how else can it eschew the difficulties, ignore and bypass the obstacles of the complex biological-psychological dimension of man, or mesmerize his subtle though limited and vulnerable rationality? It fears and shuns the concrete and discrete nature of human problems and the preoccupations of political life: it thrives on the abstract and the Promethean. It subordinates all tangible values to the one supreme value: the harnessing of man and history in a grand design of human liberation. It is not satisfied with human politics, which has so many irritating limitations. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 792

Categorization

• XREF: As a sample of the Orientalist discourse itself, this is exactly the kind of text later Islamophobia readings critique; Vatikiotis’s biological metaphor links to Said’s broader argument about how Orientalists pathologize Arab political agency.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 792