The Arab mind is allegedly incapable of abstract law-like reasoning.

Evidence

Yet we find Gibb opening the lectures he called Modern Trends in Islam as follows: … The student of Arabic civilization is constantly brought up against the striking contrast between the imaginative power displayed, for example, in certain branches of Arabic literature and the literalism, the pedantry, displayed in reasoning and exposition, even when it is devoted to these same productions. It is true that there have been great philosophers among the Muslim peoples and that some of them were Arabs, but they were rare exceptions. The Arab mind, whether in relation to the outer world or in relation to the processes of thought, cannot throw off its intense feeling for the separateness and the individuality of the concrete events. This is, I believe, one of the main factors lying behind that “lack of a sense of law” which Professor Macdonald regarded as the characteristic difference in the Oriental. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier ‘Reduced Scope’ chapter’s Orientalist arguments about the Orient as incapable of self-representation; also to the atomistic vs. holistic binary that recurs through Said’s critique. — connects to: Enlightenment rationalists framed Muslims as intellectually incapable due to their religion.
• DEFINE: Gibb’s own quotation, the raw material of Orientalist essentialism — ‘the Arab mind’ as a fixed, unchangeable entity.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘lack of a sense of law’ characterization parallels archetypal depictions of colonized peoples’ incapacity for self-rule that underpin ‘On Sacrifice”s stratified-society framing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 296