Western commentators treated eight hundred million Muslims as one undifferentiated thing

Evidence

“Militant Islam: The Historic Whirlwind” announced the New York Times Sunday Magazine on January 6, 1980; “The Islam Explosion” was the contribution of Michael Walzer in the New Republic’s December 8 issue. Both essays, like all the others, purported not only to prove that Islam was one unchanging thing that could be grasped over and above the remarkably varied history, geography, social structure, and culture of the forty Islamic nations and the approximately 800,000,000 Muslims who live in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America (including many millions in the Soviet Union and China), but also to reveal — as Walzer has it — that wherever there has been murder, war, protracted conflict involving special horrors, “Islam clearly played an important part.” It did not seem to matter that the normal rules for evidence had been suspended, or that the writer knew neither the languages nor the societies on which he pronounced, or that common sense simply withdrew when “Islam” was discussed. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 233

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Said’s demonstration that ‘Islam’ got collapsed into an evaporating abstraction while normal evidence rules suspended is a foundational, reusable critique of how whole populations get flattened by explanatory systems.
• XREF: connects to: Mainstream media gave Islamophobic commentators hundreds of appearances with minimal scrutiny.

Related

• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.83)
• No single label can explain a billion people’s diverse experiences (similarity 0.83)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.82)
• Mainstream media gave Islamophobic commentators hundreds of appearances with minimal scrutiny. (similarity 0.82)
• Media coverage of Islam systematically obscures Western actions against Muslims (similarity 0.81)
• The term Islam misrepresents most diverse Muslim life (similarity 0.81)
• Western press praised illiberal Christianity but blamed only Islam for violence. (similarity 0.81)
• A small anti-Muslim expert clique dominates US media coverage of Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Western media coverage of ordinary Muslims stayed at 0.1 percent from 2001 to 2011 (similarity 0.80)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.80)
• Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.80)
• Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.79)
• Flattening Islam into one object enabled civilizational judgments against it (similarity 0.79)
• Fear and threat dominated publications despite some positive American views of Islam (similarity 0.79)
• American rhetoric repeatedly fused Muslim identity with fanaticism (similarity 0.79)