Western orientalism shifted its archetypal Muslim from Saracen to Turk to Arab across eras

Evidence

We suggest a periodization of orientalism that recognizes its changing content as consonant with changes in the geopolitical and economic relations between East and West as well as between Christians, Muslims and Jews. We distinguish four periods. First, the Saracen period, from the rise of Islam until the end of the fourteenth century, when comparisons between Muslims and Jews were founded on religious grounds with no necessary geographic correlation, and the Islamic enemy was referred to generically as the “Saracen.” Second, the Turkish period, from the late fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, when the prototypical Muslim in the Western imagination was a “Turk.” Third, the Arab period, from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s, when the “Turk’s” place as the stereotype of the oriental was replaced by the Arab and specifically the Bedouin; orientalism was characterized by both romantic notions and progressively more openly racist vituperations; and both secular anti-Semitism and Zionism were organized as social and political movements. Fourth, the postcolonial period, when discourse about Muslims becomes primarily political and only Jews with roots in the Arab world continue—though most of them now live in Israel and the Western world—to be called “oriental” (Mizrahi). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 99

Categorization

• DEFINE: Periodization framework establishing the Saracen/Turk/Arab/Mizrahi phases of orientalism.
• SEED: An article on how the West’s ‘generic Muslim enemy’ keeps being renamed across centuries could pair this periodization with the book’s argument.
• XREF: connects to: American Orientalism fused European notions of Islam’s alienness with new Arab stereotypes — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 204