Benign scholarly intent does not escape the asymmetric structure of Orientalist knowledge.

Evidence

Massignon saw what he did as the synthesis of two roughly opposed quantities, yet it is the peculiar asymmetry between them that troubles one, and not merely the fact of the opposition between Europe and Orient. Massignon’s implication is that the essence of the difference between East and West is between modernity and ancient tradition. And indeed in his writings on political and contemporary problems, which is where one can see most immediately the limitations of Massignon’s method, the East-West opposition turns up in a most peculiar way. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 690

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Reinforces the later Islamophobia theme that well-meaning expertise still reproduces the hierarchy it claims to bridge.

Related

• Orientalist scholarship framed East-West difference as modernity versus ancient tradition (similarity 0.90)
• Even sympathetic scholars exercised a will to reshape the Orient to their own image (similarity 0.88)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists fixed the Orient in an ancient time rather than coeval modernity (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism’s denigration of its subject creates an inner contradiction for scholars who study it (similarity 0.85)
• Scholarly hostility to Shi’ism distorted Orientalist accounts of Islam (similarity 0.85)
• Rebutting Orientalism with reverse essentialism would reproduce the same intellectual failure. (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.85)
• The definition of the Orient is inseparable from the Western scholar’s identity (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.84)
• Each major Western Orientalist projected his own chosen weakness onto Islam. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism structurally mirrors Western anti-Semitism as a secret sharer (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist authority persists through a complex, differentiated institutional field rather than a monolith. (similarity 0.84)
• Prominent critics of Orientalism have praised scholars deeply complicit in its assumptions. (similarity 0.83)