European scholars were translating Ottoman texts well before any Muslim interest in Europe arose

Evidence

Hajji Khalifa wrote in 1655, that is to say, more than one hundred years after Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf (1525–1596) had brought a manuscript of the early Ottoman anonymous chronicles to Vienna in 1551, as a gift for the Emperor Ferdinand I. This book was translated into German and published in 1567; a fuller version also appeared in a Latin translation with analytical com­ mentary by Johannes Lo¨wenklau (known to scholars by the Latinized form of his name, Leonclavius). … 1655 was also a couple of decades after the establishment of the first chairs of Arabic at Cambridge in 1633 and at Oxford in 1636, much longer after the establishment of chairs in Paris and at the University of Leiden. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2049

Categorization

• XREF: Direct contrast to paragraph 2048’s Hajji Khalifa: European orientalism had active translators, Latin editions, and university chairs a century before any Muslim counterpart existed. Connects to the asymmetry argument in orientalism scholarship.