Romantic Orientalism shaped how Muslims were imagined even in positive portrayals

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the cross-cultural moral panics article and to orientalism’s construction of Muslim men as feminized/objectified alongside Polynesians.

Related

• Romantic Orientalism’s rare positive Arab portrayals were overwhelmed by negative depictions (similarity 0.93)
• European men invented two opposite images of the same Oriental woman (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist writers framed Muslim women as commodified sexual objects to be acquired (similarity 0.84)
• Romantic fiction made Polynesian and Muslim women interchangeable objects of desire (similarity 0.84)
• South Pacific and Muslim fantasy women functioned as identical objects of desire (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist paintings of Muslim women reveal European male fantasy more than real conditions. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism sustains Muslim monster imagery without originating it (similarity 0.82)
• Romanticism projected an exotic Orientalist fantasy rather than accurate knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism legitimizes Muslim monsters rather than creating them (similarity 0.82)
• Romantic environmental determinism denied Arabs the noble savage trope given to Polynesians (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist writers framed Muslim women’s bodies as commodities to be classified and acquired. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalists invented the Orient as a masculine adventure fantasy (similarity 0.80)
• The Muslim female’s imagined allure helped shape the Arab male villain (similarity 0.80)
• Western Romantic Arabism eventually shaped Arabs’ own self-image retrospectively (similarity 0.80)