Early European Orientalists related to the Orient as judges and doctors, not equals

Evidence

Many of the early English Orientalists in India were, like Jones, legal scholars, or else, interestingly enough, they were medical men with strong missionary leanings. So far as one can tell, most of them were imbued with the dual purpose of investigating “the sciences and the arts of Asia, with the hope of facilitating ameliorations there and of advancing knowledge and improving the arts at home”: so the common Orientalist goal was stated in the Centenary Volume of the Royal Asiatic Society founded in 1823 by Henry Thomas Colebrooke. … They were either judges or they were doctors. Even Edgar Quinet, writing more metaphysically than realistically, was dimly aware of this therapeutic relationship. “L’Asie a les prophètes,” he said in Le Génie des religions; “L’Europe a les docteurs.” Proper knowledge of the Orient proceeded from a thorough study of the classical texts, and only after that to an application of those texts to the modern Orient. Faced with the obvious decrepitude and political impotence of the modern Oriental, the European Orientalist found it his duty to rescue some portion of a lost, past classical Oriental grandeur in order to “facilitate ameliorations” in the present Orient. What the European took from the classical Oriental past was a vision (and thousands of facts and artifacts) which only he could employ to the best advantage; to the modern Oriental he gave facilitation and amelioration—and, too, the benefit of his judgment as to what was best for the modern Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 205

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illuminates the founding therapeutic-judicial stance of professional Orientalism: the European as doctor/judge who administers to a sick and legally incapacitated Orient.
• XREF: The doctor/judge double role prefigures biopolitical governance themes the Islamophobia readings will build on; also connects to the ‘modernizing mission’ critiques.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 205