Said saw America’s Islam obsession as secondhand and its European form as more grounded

Evidence

Edward Said addresses this in his landmark book Covering Islam, writing in 1981 that “the absence in America either of a colonial past or of a longstanding cultural attention to Islam makes the current obsession all the more peculiar, more abstract, more secondhand… . By comparison, in France, the country’s second religion in point of numbers is Islam, which may not be more popular as a result, but is certainly more known.” In Europe, the Crusades are not bygone wars, but an ongoing standoff that still grips the continent. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 832