What looks like Islamic resurgence is actually an internal contest over defining Islam

Evidence

Orientalism can only be read as a defense of Islam by suppressing half of my argument, in which I say (as I do in a subsequent book, Covering Islam) that even the primitive community we belong to natally is not immune from the interpretive contest, and that what appears in the West to be the emergence, return to, or resurgence of Islam is in fact a struggle in Islamic societies over the definition of Islam. No one person, authority, or institution has total control over that definition; hence, of course, the contest. Fundamentalism’s epistemological mistake is to think that “fundamentals” are ahistorical categories, not subject to and therefore outside the critical scrutiny of true believers, who are supposed to accept them on faith. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 839

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the interpretive-contest and definitional-power concepts that recur in later Islamophobia readings about who gets to define ‘the Muslim’. — connects to: Empire frames the jihadist struggle as an internal Muslim ideological contest — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 499
• DEFINE: Defines fundamentalism’s core error as treating ‘fundamentals’ as ahistorical — a key term for the toolkit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 839