Western scholars projected their own religious anxieties onto Oriental figures

Evidence

His al-Hallaj represents that will perfectly. The disproportionate importance accorded al-Hallaj by Massignon signifies first, the scholar’s decision to promote one figure above his sustaining culture, and second, the fact that al-Hallaj had come to represent a constant challenge, even an irritant, to the Western Christian for whom belief was not (and perhaps could not be) the extreme self-sacrifice it was for the Sufi. In either case, Massignon’s al-Hallaj was intended literally to embody, to incarnate, values essentially outlawed by the main doctrinal system of Islam, a system that Massignon himself described mainly in order to circumvent it with al-Hallaj. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 695

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of projecting the scholar’s own theological desire onto a single elevated ‘Other’ figure carries forward into how Islamophobia readings handle idealized-vs-demonized representations of Muslims.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the pattern of championing one exceptional Islamic figure against the ‘mainstream’ recur in contemporary sympathetic Western accounts of Islam?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 695