The Western image of Muslims dehumanizes them to enable colonial rule

Evidence

From the beginning, Orientalism has been committed to political projects that require the dehumanization of Muslims, especially Muslim men, who have been “linked to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) sharing an identity best described as lamentably alien.” In addition to alienating Muslims from the human community, these mythologies have helped to validate numerous colonial and imperial adventures. Orientalist fantasies continue to sustain a vision that insists upon Western supremacy and everyone else’s inferiority—a useful paradigm in a neocolonial world. The same delusions have contributed to the ideological alienation of Muslims from normativity, leading to the ways in which Muslims are seen today, as characters in a story the West has created about itself. The Orient, like the Western-created category called mysticism, which is often employed to describe “good Muslims” (i.e., Sufis and secularists), is a concept both “uncompromisingly Western and Christian.” Both the Orient and the Muslim exist in the mind of the West, bearing little semblance to reality. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own thesis that the Muslim monster functions as a Western container for disowned anxieties; also dovetails with Said’s Orientalism and the ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ binary. — connects to: The colonized were cast as both evil and childlike to justify western intervention; Early colonial rule instrumentally praised Islam rather than demonizing it — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 157; Colonialism replaced Enlightenment universalism with a racialized superiority complex toward Muslims. (+1 more)
• SEED: The parallel drawn between ‘mysticism’ as a label for good (sanitized) religion and the ‘good Muslim’ category is an essay angle: how the West manufactures benign versions of what it fears.
• DEFINE: Establishes the crucial definition that the ‘Muslim’ of Western imagination is a projection that bears little semblance to actual Muslims, defining the imaginaire itself.