Zakaria and Lewis framed Islam’s failure through rival racist essentialisms.
Evidence
Sheehi points to the different approaches Lewis and Zakaria took. He writes that if “Lewis locates the failures of Islam within the barbarism of the ‘Arab mind,’ then Zakaria locates the hate for the West in the failure of Arab political culture and economic organization.” Both are deeply racist positions. Zakaria, a student of Samuel Huntington, argued that the United States should promote free markets and democracy in the Middle East, channeling his mentor’s modernization proclivities. For people like Zakaria, creating pliant, individualistic, consumerist neo-liberal citizens in the MENA region is possibly as important as US control over oil. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 500
Categorization
- QUESTION: For the MOC goal: Zakaria is the liberal-rationalist vehicle (modernization theory) versus Lewis the neocon vehicle (Arab-mind barbarism) — two distinct discursive channels worth disentangling for the 1967-1979-to-9/11 continuity claim.
- DEFINE: Distinguishes the internal split in how scientific/cultural racism about Arabs was packaged — barbarism-essentialist (Lewis) versus cultural-economic-deficiency (Zakaria).
- XREF: connects to: Bernard Lewis maintained Arabs were unsuited to Western-style democracy even after the Arab Spring.; Said’s refusal of essentialist claims about Islam trapped him between two equal failures; Lewis’s scholarship attacked Muslim racial-prejudice and slavery myths and probed Muslim disinterest in Europe — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 467 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Lewis attributed Muslim brutality to a defect in Islamic religious culture itself.
#exemplifies(0.85) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 29 - Lewis argued Islam inherently tends toward fundamentalist violence.
#exemplifies(0.85) - Said’s refusal of essentialist claims about Islam trapped him between two equal failures
#qualifies(0.80) - Lewis’s scholarship attacked Muslim racial-prejudice and slavery myths and probed Muslim disinterest in Europe
#expands(0.80) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 467 - Bernard Lewis reduced fourteen centuries of East-West to unchanging conflict.
#exemplifies(0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 27 - Bernard Lewis justified the essentialist category of Islamic terrorism
#exemplifies(0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 398