Retitling recycled scholarship from ‘Revolt’ to ‘Return of Islam’ serves ideological ends

Evidence

In most Catholic and Protestant theological writings of the Reformation, we do not encounter efforts to nuance or move beyond medieval depictions of Islam. With the extension of the Ottoman Empire into Europe and the fracturing of Western Christianity in the Reformation, older medieval constructs of Islam are redeployed to respond to new circumstances. However, the underlying fear in Christian Europe remains the same—fear of the power and expansion of Islamic territories. It is only with the period known as the Enlightenment that we witness some of these fears subside, even if temporarily, while more significant efforts to depict Islam sympathetically come to the fore. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 157 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Islamophobia as ideology is therefore highly fluid and shifting, creatively interpreting and re-interpreting, shaping and re-shaping that which is already known in the social consensus, relevant for the ‘here and now’ as opposed to either the future or the past, balancing those reworked and reinterpreted historical ideologies of Muslims and Islam, whilst being shaped and contextualised by the wholly new symbolic forms, meanings and contexts within which today’s ideology operates, emphasised and reified in the contemporary period by both local and global influences and given voice to and disseminated through today’s globalised and mediatised environment. … With ideological content being contemporarily dynamic and fluid, continuities and interconnections with different historical and geographical contexts remain, thus refuting suggestions that ideologies are either entirely ‘new’ or entirely ‘historical’. … For any symbolic form to be given meaning, so ‘Muslims’ or ‘Islam’ or indeed both need to be identified and this is achieved through a constantly changing series of both independent and overlapping identifiers, attributes, categories, characteristics and qualities – the symbolic forms – that cut across such differentiable markers as race, ethnicity, theology, class, gender and so on. — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 839 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Arabist and Islamic studies resisted the revision that reformed other area studies; Orientalists recycled predecessors’ texts instead of observing the real Orient; Islamophobia is a fluid neo-ideology built from reinterpreted historical material — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 839 (+2 more)

Related

• Reformation polemics redeployed medieval constructs of Islam unchanged (similarity 0.87)
• Renaissance scholarship long coexisted with unrevised medieval views of Islam. (similarity 0.86)
• Islamophobia is a fluid neo-ideology built from reinterpreted historical material (similarity 0.83)
• Western attitudes to Islam have shifted across history rather than forming a constant clash. (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval theological justification for opposing Muslims has faded in Europe. (similarity 0.83)
• Western hostility to Islam shifted from theological to political rationales across the centuries (similarity 0.83)
• Islam was reframed as a rival political civilization to justify imperial violence (similarity 0.82)
• Late twentieth-century Islamophobia shifted from Orientalist exoticism toward politicised and militarised framing (similarity 0.82)
• Essentialized views of Islam make any Islamic reform a betrayal of the essence (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalists reframed Islam as a political system rather than a religion. (similarity 0.82)
• Religious war imagery about Islam is revived for specific imperial needs (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism supplied the pre-existing tropes that the War on Terror redeployed against Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Ottoman decline opened non-hostile European study of Islam (similarity 0.82)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.82)
• The fear of Islam intensified amid Ottoman decline and colonial expansion (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Orientalists recycled predecessors’ texts instead of observing the real Orient #exemplifies (0.85)
• Reformation polemics redeployed medieval constructs of Islam unchanged #exemplifies (0.82) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 157
• Islamophobia is a fluid neo-ideology built from reinterpreted historical material #expands (0.80) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 839
• Clash-of-civilizations rhetoric ideologically legitimized both foreign wars and domestic attacks #complicates (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 421