Muslims and Otherness
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As stated in Rana's essay, Muslims and their racial identity are fundamentally linked to their being, in white-majority countries, a "geographically external other". This hints to Edward Said's work on orientalist thought and the Other-ification of the orient as a 'non-West'—something imagined as entirely unlike its perceivers by virtue of distance. For Muslims, their racial identity is linked to the supposed faraway-ness of the land from which they come—regardless of the individual differences of each land. In other words, it groups them together, despite their inherent differences of culture, language, costume, and, ironically: phenotype. For the Western imperialist mind, a Muslim maintains this inherent racialised identity that, given its essential distance, is always to remain a fundamental Other, necessarily separate from Western society.