Orientalists reframed Islam to fit Christian theological categories

Evidence

For Louis Massignon, perhaps the most renowned and influential of modern French Orientalists, Islam was a systematic rejection of the Christian incarnation, and its greatest hero was not Mohammed or Averroës but al-Hallaj, a Muslim saint who was crucified by the orthodox Muslims for having dared to personalize Islam. What Becker and Massignon explicitly left out of their studies was the eccentricity of the Orient, which they backhandedly acknowledged by trying so hard to regularize it in Western terms. Mohammed was thrown out, but al-Hallaj was made prominent because he took himself to be a Christ-figure. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 291

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Christ-figure’ reframing of al-Hallaj shows the imposition of Christian categories onto Islam — the same representational violence the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit needs. — connects to: Islamic scholarship by Christian academics reframed Islam as a shared spiritual enterprise — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1740
• SHARE: The al-Hallaj detail — a Muslim saint executed for personalizing Islam, then promoted by a French Orientalist as a Christ-figure — is a striking anecdote for anyone engaging with comparative religion.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 291