Based on a binary that made Europe the antithesis of the "Orient" and "Orient" synonymous with the "Muslim world," Orientalism spawned the corollary view that Muslims were a monolithic racial or ethnic bloc, imagined in the narrow form of an Arab or Middle Eastern.

XREF: Connects directly to Edward Said's foundational Orientalism thesis about how Western scholarship constructed the 'Orient' as a homogenized counter-image of Europe.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 161