Early Orientalists had to disavow Islam’s influence to remain acceptable to Europe

Evidence

It is not surprising, then, that the first major work of Oriental scholarship after d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque was Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens, whose first volume appeared in 1708. A recent historian of Orientalism has opined that Ockley’s attitude towards the Muslims—that to them is owed what was first known of philosophy by European Christians—“shocked painfully” his European audience. For not only did Ockley make this Islamic pre-eminence clear in his work; he also “gave Europe its first authentic and substantial taste of the Arab viewpoint touching the wars with Byzantium and Persia.” However, Ockley was careful to dissociate himself from the infectious influence of Islam, and unlike his colleague William Whiston (Newton’s successor at Cambridge), he always made it clear that Islam was an outrageous heresy. For his Islamic enthusiasm, on the other hand, Whiston was expelled from Cambridge in 1709. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Orientalist double-move of appropriation-plus-repudiation that later Islamophobia readings will treat as the core mechanism of representing the Other.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 198