The desert genre justified European stewardship over arrested peoples

Evidence

In the genre of fiction known as “The Arab of the Desert,” the desert “symbolized the alleged unproductive, fossilized nature of the Arab and Muslim world,” which was in need of European stewardship. Because of their arrested development, the Arab, Turk, and African could not take care of themselves and needed outside help. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 407

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘in need of stewardship’ logic is the paternalism that underwrites Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ and the civilizing mission — same mechanism that appears in European justification for colonizing.