Reductive categories persist even when sympathetic scholars confront contemporary political events

Evidence

When, for example, in 1960 he and Jacques Berque, his colleague at the Collège de France, published their dialogue on “the Arabs” in Esprit, a good deal of the time was spent in arguing whether the best way to look at the problems of the contemporary Arabs was simply to say, in the main instance, that the Arab-Israeli conflict was really a Semitic problem. Berque tried to demur gently, and to nudge Massignon towards the possibility that like the rest of the world the Arabs had undergone what he called an “anthropological variation”: Massignon refused the notion out of hand. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 691

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows the Islamophobia field’s critique of singular abstractions like ‘the Muslim’ overriding specific historical realities. — connects to: the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 691