Philological reduction of language legitimates claims connecting race to mind and character.

Evidence

Starting from this idea that Muslims are a race, Orientalists claimed to be able to explain the “Muslim mind” or the “Arab mind.” Because race-based theories assume that the members of a race are all alike, scholars within this tradition could make sweeping generalizations about how Muslims think and behave. Most of all, the “Muslim mind” was disparaged; as the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind. And even if you do, it won’t be worth the toil.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 126 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moral and physiological traits were fused onto racialized types to ground genetic universal claims; Colonial race epistemology merged physical traits with moral character assessments; Positivist truths are linguistic illusions grown canonical through use (+14 more)

Related

• Orientalist doctrine attributes untruthfulness to a racialized Oriental mind (similarity 0.86)
• Racial homogeneity assumptions enabled sweeping claims about the ‘Muslim mind’ (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist truth about racial difference was radical and ineradicable (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial-era science transformed Muslims into a fixed racialized type (similarity 0.83)
• Said persistently conflates claims about the essence of Oriental racial identity with claims about the essence of Islamic religious doctrine, so a critique of racial essentialism does not easily… (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist dissenters defended Islam’s internal diversity against essentializing stereotypes (similarity 0.82)
• American officials read educated Muslims as a racially distinct civilized breed apart. (similarity 0.82)
• Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking (similarity 0.81)
• Linguistic difference was mapped directly onto presumed racial difference. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism replaced Enlightenment universalism with a racialized superiority complex toward Muslims. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist civilizational essentialism is a pillar of race making (similarity 0.80)
• Race-as-inferiority toward Arabs and Muslims emerged only with nineteenth-century colonial power (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship conflates Muslims and Jews into one racial type (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship varied internally but shared the racial category (similarity 0.80)
• Even anti-racist Orientalists held fixed cultural essences for the racialized (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Linguistic distinctions were extended to claim ontological differences between peoples #corroborates (0.90)
• Racial homogeneity assumptions enabled sweeping claims about the ‘Muslim mind’ #exemplifies (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 126
• Colonial race epistemology merged physical traits with moral character assessments #expands (0.82)
• Positivist truths are linguistic illusions grown canonical through use #corroborates (0.80)
• The truth of ideas is independent of their social origins #contradicts (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 210
• Language creates consciousness of self as separate from the environment. #expands (0.78)
• Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking #expands (0.72)