Orientalists and Islamic fundamentalists can converge on shared claims about Islam

Evidence

According to Laroui, Gibb was downright hostile to contemporary Islamic reformism. There was a strange kind of collusion between Orientalists like Gibb and Islamic fundamentalists, as both parties could agree on propositions like ‘Islam and democracy are incompatible’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 587

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the pattern of ‘immodesty’/moral-panic framings where opposed camps end up agreeing on a premise about the Other — here Orientalists and fundamentalists both premise that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

Related

• Gibb frames Islam’s problem as a gulf between doctrine and modern intellect (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholars impose external analytical categories that Muslims themselves would not recognize (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship privileged a monolithic textual Islam over lived human realities (similarity 0.82)
• The Orient’s inability to reformulate itself authorizes the Orientalist’s corrective futurism (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic Orientalism treats resistance to change as the Orient’s essential trait (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist essentialism structurally opposes all Islamic reform as betrayal. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is a political doctrine arising from Western dominance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial administrator attitudes toward the Orient formed a shared consensus (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic scholarship by Christian academics reframed Islam as a shared spiritual enterprise (similarity 0.79)
• Attributing every social development to Islam erases the role of colonialism and politics (similarity 0.79)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist categories can contradict what Muslims would say about themselves (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist scholarship framed East-West difference as modernity versus ancient tradition (similarity 0.78)