Anti-Orientalist polemicists made basic historical and source-language errors

Evidence

His short book, Orientalism, was published in 1999.31 The influence of Said’s earlier book is pervasive, though Sardar has added some digressions on cultural studies, as well some factual errors that are entirely original to him. … He claims that the ‘foundation of Orientalism was laid by John of Damascus’ and adds that his book became ‘the classical source of all Christian writings on Islam’. But John wrote in Greek and most of those Christians who wrote about Islam in the following centuries knew no Greek. Sardar has Pope Urban preach the First Crusade at Clermont in 1096. The correct date is 1095. Writing about the Crusades, he claims that ‘Jerusalem itself did not fall back into Muslim hands until 1244’. Actually Saladin occupied it in 1187. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 594

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors Milgrom/opt-out-of-legal-system material: challengers of an established system can be sloppy on the very facts that legitimate their challenge. — connects to: Decontextualized polemic becomes misread as straightforward history

Related

• Decontextualized polemic becomes misread as straightforward history (similarity 0.90)