Another version of a They

Said:

Yet--and here we must be very clear--Orientalism overode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet mutliplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran woudl be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Msulim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch)from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never
revise itself (Lodge 370).

Here Said astutely figures a Western view of the Other, as, in particular, unchanging. It's only a short leap to figure this Other as unchanging in its desire: what Muslims want is Shariah law, because all Muslims are irrationally religious. The note about the specific human detail being abstracted to a transhuman one is also worth recalling re: CT, with its voracious habit of elevating minor details into a carefully orchestrated plan.