The image of Islam, modernization ideology, and Israel’s value form a mutually reinforcing triad.

Evidence

In these ways, three sets of illusions economically buttress and reproduce one another in the interests of shoring up the Western self-image and promoting Western power over the Orient: the view of Islam, the ideology of modernization, and the affirmations of Israel’s general value to the West. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 159

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the chapter’s central synthesis: three interconnected illusions that mutually legitimize Western hegemony.

Related

• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.82)
• Islamism presupposes and works through the Western-imposed nation-state rather than rejecting it. (similarity 0.81)
• Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.81)
• Reductive images of Islam spawn mirror-image apologetic counterreductions (similarity 0.80)
• Interrogating Western-ness is required to expunge Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• Modernization theory treated Islam as a timeless childish civilization needing rescue. (similarity 0.80)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.79)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.79)
• Coercive civilizational labels like West and Islam serve immediate political purposes (similarity 0.79)
• Western images of Muslims and Jews formed in inextricable conjunction (similarity 0.79)
• Every empire legitimizes itself by denying imperial motives (similarity 0.79)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic doctrine has justified opposite political programs alike (similarity 0.79)
• A coherent internal image of Islam survived because it was internally consistent (similarity 0.78)
• Western anti-Muslim and Islamic anti-Western narratives reinforce each other (similarity 0.78)