Said’s Orientalist tropes originated with Eastern Christians, not Western colonizers

Evidence

Terence Hawkes has said that “a colonist acts essentially as a dramatist. He imposes the ‘shape’ of his own culture, embodied in his speech, on the new world and makes that world recognizable, habitable, ‘natural,’ able to speak his language.” The same could be said for the colonized, in this case for Eastern Christians during the first two Muslim centuries. Refusing to acknowledge the fundamental and irreversible nature of the advent of Islam, they imposed the familiar forms of the old Christian Roman commonwealth on the new world of Islam, casting their adversaries (especially Muhammad) in familiar and despised roles, roles that allowed the Christian writer to hope for a happy ending. … The negative “orientalist” portrayals of Islam that Edward Said denounces in his Orientalism as the ideological underpinnings of French and British colonialism in fact have their origins in the defensive reactions of Christian “orientals,” unwitting subjects of the new Muslim empire. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates and re-grounds the genealogy traced through Aziz and Razack, who take up Said’s framework — this locates the origin of Orientalist tropes among the colonized Eastern Christians themselves.
• DEEPTHINKING: Frames negative portrayals of Islam as a colonized minority’s defensive projection rather than a colonizer’s tool, upending the standard directionality of the Orientalism thesis.