British scholars could devote careers to Islam while despising it

Evidence

Although he spent much of his life studying Islam, he hated the subject. In part, his horror of Islam may have been influenced by his experience of the Indian Mutiny. Despite his fervent Christianity, The Caliphate, its rise, decline and fall (1891) may also have been influenced by Gibbon’s account of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The caliphate was in the end brought low by barbarism and superstition, though in Muir’s book both the barbarism and the superstition were Muslim. Muir denounced the Prophet as both a servant of the Devil and an epileptic. Any Hadiths that showed the Prophet in a bad light were bound to be true: those that portrayed him more favourably were dubious. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 287

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The demonstration that a scholar can spend a life studying a subject he hates, with his source-critical method openly reversed by sectarian bias, is a dense, paradigm-warping portrait of bad-faith scholarship worth sitting with.