Islam was more than just a religion, and more often, in the minds of Orientalists, not a religion. Rather, oldand especially new-guard Orientalists framed it as a competing political system—a totalitarian system made in the mirror image of the West, or what Said labeled the “Occident.” Islam, therefore, was a rival “civilization” mangled by Western hands to facilitate their imperial ambitions and justify the violence they inflicted on masses of Muslims who—far from the shores of Europe—were painted as imminent threats. The imminence was not physical or even geographic, but tied to memory and lucid in the imagination; namely, the memory of those old and original Crusades, always present in the collective psyche of Europe, and later, the United States.

XREF: Connects to Said's 'Orientalism' and the broader postcolonial theory the reader is likely engaging with.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 272