This strategy, however, flew in the face of reality and was doomed to fail. Had the Orientalists actually bothered to study the facts on the ground, they would have concluded, as Walter Laqueur did in 1956, that what "is decisive is that Islam has gradually ceased to be a serious competitor of Communism in the struggle for the souls of the present and potential elites in the countries of the Middle East." If that was true of communism, it was even more so of nationalism. Shockingly, Arabs, like other people, were capable of separating religion in their private lives from politics. This is, of course, a shock only to those mired in Orientalist traditions, and in the following chapter we will see that this separation of politics and religion has a long history in the ironically misnamed "Muslim world."

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 229