Foundational Western Orientalist scholars openly wrote Islam and Judaism as enemies of civilization

Evidence

How else is one to explain the enormous labors represented by the work of William Muir (1819–1905), for example, or of Reinhart Dozy (1820–1883), and the impressive antipathy in that work to the Orient, Islam, and the Arabs? Characteristically, Renan was one of Dozy’s supporters, just as in Dozy’s four-volume Histoire des Mussulmans d’Espagne, jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides (1861) there appear many of Renan’s anti-Semitic strictures, compounded in 1864 by a volume arguing that the Jews’ primitive God was not Jahweh but Baal, proof for which was to be found in Mecca, of all places. Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1858–1861) and his The Caliphate, Its Rise, Decline and Fall (1891) are still considered reliable monuments of scholarship, yet his attitude towards his subject matter was fairly put by him when he said that “the sword of Muhammed, and the Kor’ān, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 386

Categorization

• XREF: The pairing of anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic strictures in Dozy anticipates the reader’s Islamophobia-module interest in how Orientalist discourse bundled Jews and Muslims as comparable ‘Semitic’ others.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 386