The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it

Evidence

And we must note immediately that it is always the West, and not Christianity, that seems pitted against Islam. Why? Because the assumption is that whereas “the West” is greater than and has surpassed the stage of Christianity, its principal religion, the world of Islam — its varied societies, histories, and languages notwithstanding — is still mired in religion, primitivity, and backwardness. Therefore, the West is modern, greater than the sum of its parts, full of enriching contradictions and yet always “Western” in its cultural identity; the world of Islam, on the other hand, is no more than “Islam,” reducible to a small number of unchanging characteristics despite the appearance of contradictions and experiences of variety that seem on the surface to be as plentiful as those of the West. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 123

Categorization

• XREF: The secularized-West-versus-religious-Islam asymmetry ties into debates in the reader’s corpus on orientalism and civilizational discourse. — connects to: The Judeo-Christian category is a mid-twentieth-century construct that erases Islam from the West — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 229

Related

• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.87)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.85)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.85)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.85)
• The West’s defining critique of Islam centered on a contrast of indulgence versus asceticism. (similarity 0.85)
• Coercive civilizational labels like West and Islam serve immediate political purposes (similarity 0.84)
• The West’s Muslims are fictional characters in a story about itself. (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval Christian polemics could only read Islam as affirming or negating Christianity (similarity 0.83)
• Western images of Muslims and Jews formed in inextricable conjunction (similarity 0.83)
• The West understood Islam as closest intellectually to Judaism. (similarity 0.83)
• Islam was judged deficient for differing from Christian structures (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobia descends directly from Orientalism’s civilizational divide between Islam and the West (similarity 0.83)
• The West’s polemical image of Islam was self-serving rather than descriptive (similarity 0.83)
• Islam has been Europe’s defining other across centuries (similarity 0.83)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.83)