The fundamental baseline of Orientalism was casting the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the West. Said opens Orientalism with this: "The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience." The process of characterizing and vilifying the Muslim world, which Orientalists dub the Orient, became the very way in which the West, as well as its principal thinkers, statesmen, and tastemakers, came to define itself. This mirrored identity was very much a fluid dialectic, whereby the shifting characterizations of the Muslim world—informed by political engagements with Muslim-majority nations, colonial interventions and projects, and most intensely, clashes—would also inform how the West saw itself.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial theory about how colonizing powers construct their own identity through the denigrated Other.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 159