The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself.

Evidence

The fundamental baseline of Orientalism was casting the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the West. Said opens Orientalism with this: “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” The process of characterizing and vilifying the Muslim world, which Orientalists dub the Orient, became the very way in which the West, as well as its principal thinkers, statesmen, and tastemakers, came to define itself. This mirrored identity was very much a fluid dialectic, whereby the shifting characterizations of the Muslim world—informed by political engagements with Muslim-majority nations, colonial interventions and projects, and most intensely, clashes—would also inform how the West saw itself. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 159 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Orientalism informed not only how race was understood during the formative stages of American history, but also how it was constructed. Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of whiteness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization. In order to solidify itself as part of the West, and an extension of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had to follow in the footsteps of Europe and establish itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 154 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Western projects justify themselves by framing colonized peoples as incapable of self-improvement.; Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites.; The West is a historical construct defined by development traits, not geography (+12 more)

Related

• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. (similarity 0.94)
• “Splitting” renders the Rest the West’s mirror-image Other (similarity 0.91)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.89)
• The US needed Islam as a foil to define itself as Western (similarity 0.89)
• Islamic challenge forged the collective identity of ‘the West’ (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.88)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. (similarity 0.86)
• The Occident defines itself as the mirror image of the Orient (similarity 0.86)
• The West-Orient binary found its first legitimised modern manifestation in Orientalism (similarity 0.86)
• Bush’s rhetoric reduced Islam to a single object judged against Western values. (similarity 0.85)
• The Westerner’s intimate estrangement from the Orient reinforces the Orientalist discourse built on it. (similarity 0.85)
• All Western writers treated the Orient as fixed, feminine, and needing redemption (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.84)
• The idea of the West helped constitute the West itself (similarity 0.84)
• The West’s formation cannot be explained without reference to the Rest (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. #exemplifies (0.90) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 159
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse #expands (0.88)
• The US needed Islam as a foil to define itself as Western #exemplifies (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 154
• The West concept classifies, represents, compares, and evaluates societies #expands (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 509
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency #expands (0.80)
• Western modernity is a hegemonic particularism disguised as universalism #expands (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 153