Conventional Islamic historiography is covertly molded by opposition to modern conditions

Evidence

The links between such scholarly assumptions and their deep foundations in the sovereign Enlightenment structure of thought may be subtle, but they cannot be too subtle for a scholar with a deep sense of ethical responsibility. Such conventional historiographical ventures, it must be recognized, are nearly always situated within a latent context of (oppositional) comparison with a modern (or rather modernist) situation, one that has driven the question of research in the first place. … These topics of research, like countless others, have no future promise without reckoning with the immediate and critical questions of the day, those that are increasingly compelling us to interrogate the very ethical foundations of the premises underlying these fields. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the critique of “hero history” and of framing studies as Shari’a versus state, echoing the wider postcolonial and decolonial critique of using Western categories to read Islamic history.