Eighteenth-century Orientalist scholarship could diminish inherited anti-Islamic prejudice without new bias

Evidence

His description of Arabia in the “Time of Ignorance’ is calculated to show the predisposition of the Arabs to receive Islamic teaching, but it is an historical account drawn dispassionately from Arab sources, not an argument about the sins to which the Muslims-to-be were prone … On the main point of Muhammad’s good intentions or hypocrisy, his views look forward to those that were to become established after his time: he disowns any intention to decide whether Muhammad proclaimed the unity of God as ‘the effect of enthusiasm, or only a design to raise himself to the supreme government of the country’ … This cannot look very friendly or respectful to the Muslim who, when he reads it, comes across the ancient Christian attitude for the first time, but, read in its context, it is singularly unprejudiced, represents the diminution of prejudice by scholarship; nor does it, like the works of Savary, and Voltaire and others we have discussed, substitute some new prejudice for the old. Sale grinds no axes. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1707

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s claim (Anidjar, Aziz) that Orientalism was uniformly constitutive of Islam as the West’s enemy — Sale’s flat denial of ulterior motives cuts against the totalizing genealogy.
• QUESTION: The author treats the ‘will to decide motivation’ as the polemic move par excellence; worth checking whether this framing of good-or-bad-intentions as inherently polemical recurs in the anti-Orientalist literature in the vault.