ABSTRACT
Essentialism is of course something of a taboo in academia and high intellectual culture in the English-speaking world, and if there is one person most prominently associated with anti-essentialism about Islam, it is Edward Said. 'Orientalism staked its existence, not upon its openness, its receptivity to the Orient, but rather on its internal, repetitious, consistency about its constitutive will to power over the Orient.' Imperialism derived support from racism, and as for racism, it is 'correct to say that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric'. Essentialism about doctrines is a more complicated affair than essentialism applied to the textbook examples just alluded to, simply because doctrines are slightly more complicated in relevant respects than the chemical elements familiar to people from high school chemistry or the artefacts familiar to people from daily life.
