The negative portrait of Islam underwrote Christian imperial rule centuries before modern empire

Evidence

Where Guibert de Nogent used the polemical biography of Muhammad to justify the conquests of the first Crusade, Alfonso deploys the same traditions as the foundation of his own power over subject Muslims. Here is a clear example of the kind of discourse that Edward Said decried in nineteenth-century apologists for British and French empire: a derogatory portrayal of Islam as a basis for the military and political domination of Muslims. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 907

Categorization

• XREF: Strikingly anticipates and genealogically grounds Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis — showing the phenomenon is not merely modern but already structurally present in 13th-century Castile.
• QUESTION: Said located the discourse in modern empire; Tolan asserts medieval antecedents. Worth chasing whether Said acknowledged these or whether this is a genuine revision of Orientalism’s periodization.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes Orientalism’s genealogy — if the demeaning-Islam-justifies-domination pattern is fully operative in Alfonso’s legal code, ‘modern’ Orientalism is not an invention but a redeployment of a persistent template.