Colonial institutions on the ground, not scholarly texts, transformed Islamic learning itself

Evidence

As of the early nineteenth century, Orientalists too made it their business to study what they perceived as “Islam”; but the manuscripts, archives, and artifacts of that world were patently not deciphered within an Islamic cultural context, or within a profoundly ethicized framework or habitus, a crucial absence in their enterprise. For the first time in the history of Islam, its cultural production, especially its text-based traditions (now narrowly conceived and stripped of their cultural and psychological surrounds), was to be subjected to an entirely foreign, but also hegemonic and transformative, hermeneutic. This was not only an enterprise intent on organizing Europe’s “scholarly curiosity,” but one that effectively appropriated, refracted, and redefined the ways Muslims themselves thought of, and about, the world. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, when imperialism in all of its forms had completed its main mission, no Muslim historian could even attempt—much less be capable of producing—a Tabarian, Masʿudian, or Kathirian history, these standing at one time as indubitable exemplars of Islamic historiographical narratives. Nor was it conceivable in the least that a Juwayni, a Razi, or a Nasafi could be replicated in the central sharʿi domain—or any other for that matter. These paragons of paradigmatic Islamic learning effectively and fairly quickly became expressions of a dead past. This Oriental epistemic transformation, which was not possible without performative colonialist institutions on the ground, did not represent the culmination of a European Orientalist discourse inside the Orientalist text that was geared to the Western reader, as Said had thought, but it was rather the product of the actual operations of an Orientalism on the ground, one in which forces larger than Orientalism as a scholarly and philological discipline were at play. … This is in good part the meaning of what I have referred to in the previous chapter as structural genocide. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 451

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages and complicates Edward Said’s Orientalism, which claimed the discourse was geared to Western readers; Hallaq argues against the textual locus Said assigned.
• DEFINE: Introduces and concretizes ‘structural genocide’ as a concept — epistemic destruction of an entire civilization’s mode of learning.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that colonial power operated through hermeneutics that redefined how the colonized themselves thought — epistemic transformation as material force, redrawing the line between text and institution — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting move beyond Said.