Philological study reduced Muslims to an arrested-development subspecies

Evidence

Homo islamicus (the “Islamic man”) and “the Muslim mind” are examples of the fictions that established Occidental superiority. Texts served as the foundation of early Orientalist scholarship. “The essential characteristics of the members of the subspecies could be identified by the use of philological methods to study certain key texts which were regarded as embodying the core principles of Islamic civilization.” Such a process established the Muslim as a subject, rather than a human individual, formulating a character stuck in arrested development and incapable, unlike the white man, of adapting to modernity. This allowed the placement of Muslims in a time and space removed from the West’s normative human community, which had progressed forward, unlike the legions stuck in the Islamic world. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 42

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The ‘subspecies stuck in time’ move parallels Homi Bhabha’s colonial stereotype theory and the reader’s connecting thread across theology, tribal tales, and art.
• SEED: An essay angle: tracing how philology-as-science lent false authority to racialized characterizations of Muslims, and how ‘the Muslim mind’ persists as a scientific-sounding stereotype today.

Related

• Orientalist philology reduced Muslims to a fixed subspecies outside modernity (similarity 0.94)
• Philological analysis of key texts established Muslims as static subspecies (similarity 0.79)
• Religious identity can become racialized by imputing biological and cultural inferiority (similarity 0.79)
• Philological reduction of language legitimates claims connecting race to mind and character. (similarity 0.78)