As Edward Said says in his seminal text Orientalism, “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Orientalism has several meanings, but for our understanding, it’s best to focus on this particular articulation: “Orientalism is a style of thought” that sought to make clear... See more

Said is helpful in summarizing the key message from this section: “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”

Our orientation in the West also has infiltrated how we view religions (and, by proxy, religious people) across the globe, even though our assumptions about religion may not be universally true. And because of the West’s powerful role in academia, the media, and global affairs, we also may hold certain assumptions about other faiths and traditions... See more

Muslim women in the mainstream media are constantly forced to show their credentials as “good Muslims” in order to be taken seriously by Western audiences who have no real conception of Islam.

The binary of the Eastern World and the Western World is particularly fraught; these very terms imply a separation of identities, borders, and ideologies. It implies that we in the West all believe in one set of values, while the others in the East believe in a different value system. The West assumes that our view of the world and its many diverse... See more

Islamophobia has a complicated genealogy—one that’s entangled with religious discrimination and racism—but this one, small example is a display of how Orientalism and the cultural allegiance to Christianity bred by secularism persists.

Secularism is an important cornerstone of America and the West more broadly. It’s how we distinguish ourselves from other nations, and how we assert ourselves as modern and others as backwards. This has led us to believe that Western nations are more progressive (in part, because of their ability to diminish the role of religion in politics) while... See more

Coming from a Western perspective, it’s important to acknowledge how the concept of secularism may (1) have deceived us into thinking that religion doesn’t impact the public sphere and (2) have led us into assuming that the separation of church and state is a universal “good” that everyone in the world should emulate.

Nevertheless, the move toward secularism has allowed the white, Western world to see ourselves as modern—and any foreign land, government, or people that do not embrace secularism as not modern, and therefore, other. Secular nations view themselves as superior to nations that still have religion involved in their governments—even if those cultures’... See more