Western identity is constructed through contrast with Muslim bodies.

Evidence

The insistence that modernity is an idea and not a project has left in place a conception of the ideal citizen as someone unanchored in history and concrete social relations. Such a sovereign subject knows himself or herself as autonomous only through comparison to an Other, considered to be less advanced and still mired in community. Muslim men’s and women’s bodies become the ground on which we construct ourselves as modern and as sovereign. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Orientalist ‘Othering’ dynamic in Edward Said’s Orientalism and similar descriptions in Home Boy about Muslim identity. — connects to: A fixed polemical image of Islam served Western needs better than firsthand observation did.