The feminized Orient awaited masculinist European conquest in colonial literature

Evidence

In colonial-era literature, Muslim characters are presented as greedy, untrustworthy, backward, and violent—the “key menacing figure” in the Oriental milieu—a product of the desert’s wild and petrified nature. Descriptions of Egypt often refer to barbarity and cruelty, both reflected in depictions of the men of the region. In a review of the novel Sethos, Egypt is “that nation of sages, and of savages; the source of philosophic illumination, and the sink of barbarous ignorance; the mistress of the mightiest and the tributary of the meanest; earth’s palace of splendor, and her hospital of wretchedness.” The use of “mistress” is not accidental. The Orient was envisioned as a place awaiting European conquest, and European men traveling to Oriental shores often referred to it as “a voyage towards Woman.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 408

Categorization

• XREF: That Egypt is both ‘sage and savage, palace and hospital, mistress and tributary’ is the classic Orientalist binary self-contradiction in one breath — echoes Said’s observation that the Orient is simultaneously alluring and threatening.
• SEED: ‘A voyage towards Woman’ — the gendering of travel-as-conquest could seed an essay on how exploration narratives eroticize conquest, or a piece on the sexualized vocabulary of Orientalism.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘voyage towards Woman’ conquest vocabulary connects to my modesty/complaints piece — both hinge on the West projecting its own anxieties about sex and civilization onto the Orient.