Lila Abu-Lughod takes up and extends this point, indicating how such “culturalist” explanations for women’s oppression—which lay the blame squarely at the door of Islam—conveniently ignore the longer, entangled histories of the evolution of certain social systems, a story that, given the legacies of colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization, ought really to include Western support for the repressive regimes that have allowed such ideologies to thrive. In works such as those I analyze here, which totally omit any consideration of previous U.S. interference in each nation’s affairs, selective decontextualization allows the author to attribute all the abuses we see to a brute named “Islam” that works everywhere to curtail human rights.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism and the broader literature on how Western discourse constructs Islam as a monolithic explanation rather than engaging with political and historical complexity. SEED: Potential essay angle: how decontextualization as a rhetorical device operates in contemporary media coverage of Muslim-majority countries, paralleling Abu-Lughod's analysis.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 209