In addition to alienating Muslims from the human community, these mythologies have helped to validate numerous colonial and imperial adventures. Orientalist fantasies continue to sustain a vision that insists upon Western supremacy and everyone else's inferiority—a useful paradigm in a neocolonial world. The same delusions have contributed to the ideological alienation of Muslims from normativity, leading to the ways in which Muslims are seen today, as characters in a story the West has created about itself.

XREF: Builds on Edward Said's Orientalism thesis about how Western representations of the East serve imperial power.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 44