Texts served as the foundation of early Orientalist scholarship. “The essential characteristics of the members of the subspecies could be identified by the use of philological methods to study certain key texts which were regarded as embodying the core principles of Islamic civilization.” Such a process established the Muslim as a subject, rather than a human individual, formulating a character stuck in arrested development and incapable, unlike the white man, of adapting to modernity.

DEFINE: Explains how the 'subject' framing of Orientalist scholarship operated — through philological study of key texts that were taken to embody Islamic civilization. XREF: Connects to Said's broader thesis on Orientalism as a discursive construction of the Orient, and to critiques of philology as a colonial knowledge practice. SEED: Angle for an essay: how 'foundational texts' methodologies in any field smuggle in assumptions of cultural stasis versus adaptability.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 42