Prioritizing religious identity over concrete disadvantage distorts political analysis

Evidence

The fundamental question raised by such contemporary Orientalist texts as The Cambridge History is whether ethnic origins and religion are the best, or at least the most useful, basic, and clear, definitions of human experience. Does it matter more in understanding contemporary politics to know that X and Y are disadvantaged in certain very concrete ways, or that they are Muslims or Jews? This is of course a debatable question, and we are very likely in rational terms to insist on both the religious-ethnic and the socio-economic descriptions; Orientalism, however, clearly posits the Islamic category as the dominant one, and this is the main consideration about its retrograde intellectual tactics. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 772

Categorization

• XREF: The choice between religious-ethnic and socio-economic explanation prefigures debates in the Islamophobia field about whether Muslim exclusion is driven by identity categories or material disadvantage. — connects to: Critiques of victim-identification culture span opposed political positions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1938
• QUESTION: Worth carrying forward: how does one decide when the religious-ethnic frame is warranted versus a smokescreen for socio-economic explanation?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 772