Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels.

Evidence

No one simply happens upon Islam, Islamic culture, or Islamic society. For the citizen of a Western industrial state today, Islam is encountered by virtue either of the political oil crisis, or of fundamentalism and terrorism, or of intense media attention, or of the longstanding tradition of expert — that is, Orientalist — commentary on Islam in the West. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s core thesis from his other works, Orientalism, about how knowledge of the Orient is always mediated through power structures.

Related

• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.88)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.83)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.83)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.83)
• Interrogating Western-ness is required to expunge Islamophobia (similarity 0.83)
• Western apprehension of Islam is moral and cosmological, not empirical. (similarity 0.83)
• Understanding Islam’s coverage requires demystifying the power-knowledge link (similarity 0.82)
• European awareness of Islam stems from direct colonial and demographic experience (similarity 0.82)
• The Islamic world increasingly learns about itself through Western-produced images (similarity 0.82)
• The Western canon of Islam was fixed by 1350 and endured for centuries. (similarity 0.82)
• American obsession with Islam is secondhand because America lacks a colonial past (similarity 0.81)
• Coercive civilizational labels like West and Islam serve immediate political purposes (similarity 0.81)
• Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.81)
• European scholarship on Islam turned disinterested only once Islam ceased threatening Europe. (similarity 0.81)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.81)