In Samir Amin’s more sanguine view, “the project of contemporary political Islam … is a conservative project, completely acceptable to the capitalist world order,” and Western governments “know that the power of political Islam has the virtue, for them, of rendering the people powerless and, consequently, ensuring their comprador status.… The savagery attributed to the people who are the primary victims of political Islam facilitates the growth of Islamophobia. That, in turn, makes it easier to accept the prospect of an increasingly polarized capitalist expansion.”

XREF: Connects to debates about Islamophobia as a tool of Western economic hegemony versus the framing of political Islam purely as anti-Western resistance.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 58