Romantic Orientalism’s rare positive Arab portrayals were overwhelmed by negative depictions

Evidence

Romanticism contributes to the Western imaginaire surrounding Islam, even today. Fantasies about maidens and monsters influenced the ways in which Orientalism constructed Jewish and Muslim men and women. Polynesian men were sexually objectified, at times as much as their female counterparts, and the same was true for Muslims. In the genre of Romantic Orientalism, we find descriptions of the East as a “terrain of bitumen pools, river-bores, whirlpools and rainbows in moving waters.” What Mohammad Sharafuddin calls “romantic moralism,” in which Arabs were “not merely superstitious people, but cultured beings capable of spiritual experience,” was quite rare in comparison to the large numbers of negative depictions in the literature and art of the period. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 373

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s monster-projecting thesis: even Romanticism’s ‘exceptions’ confirm the dominant negative construction of Arab men as monsters, versus Polynesians as noble savages.
• QUESTION: Sharafuddin’s ‘romantic moralism’ exceptions are worth chasing - who exactly composed the rare positive accounts, and what were their motives?