Even brilliant, anti-colonial Orientalists produced scholarship rooted in colonial interests

Evidence

In his Post-Orientalism, Hamid Dabashi eloquently critiques Said’s sweeping brush by noting the attributes of I. Goldziher, one of the greatest Orientalists to have lived. Like Massignon, Goldziher was an “exemplary scholar of unsurpassed brilliance, … a humanist with a vast catholicity of learning rarely seen among his peers, a politically alert and intellectually diligent activist who opposed colonialism of all sorts as a matter of moral principle.” Yet, Dabashi duly recognizes that “Goldziher’s scholarship was integral to a mode of knowledge production at once exceedingly productive and insightful and yet at its very epistemic root predicated on European colonial interests in what they called the ‘Orient.’ ” See Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 107–8. We should remind ourselves that it was also Goldziher who single-handedly destroyed, via that epistemic root, the entire edifice of Islam’s prophetic traditions (hadith), an act raised to perfection by Said’s Columbia colleague, Joseph Schacht. More importantly, it is the absence of this type of “root” from Guénon that marks this latter as, first, a different type of author and as, second, representing a genuine refutation of Said’s categorical brush. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 855

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that intellectual brilliance can coexist with a politically loaded epistemic foundation parallels the diamond-trade reputation chapters’ finding that beneficial institutions can rest on ethically fraught foundations. — connects to: Many colonial-period intellectuals stood outside the Western tradition. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 862; Orientalist scholarship was internally divided between empire servants and anti-colonial critics
• SEED: Essay angle: how do we hold the tension that a scholar can both oppose colonialism personally and do work that serves it structurally — the ‘personal virtue vs. epistemic complicity’ problem as a general phenomenon, not just in Orientalism.