French and British Islam scholars are humanists tied to national interest
Evidence
The most effective way of understanding the precise quality of this vision, which has the force of unquestioned faith, is to compare it once again with the situation obtaining in Britain and France, those two predecessors of the United States in the Islamic world. In both countries there has always been a cadre of Islamic experts, of course, with a longstanding advisory role in formulating — and even executing — government as well as commercial policy. But in both instances there was an immediate task at hand: the administering of rule in colonies. This was the case until the end of World War II. The Islamic world was viewed as a discrete series of problems, and knowledge about those problems was on the whole positivistic as well as directly engaged. … This is why today in France and Britain great scholars of Islam are public figures whose raison d’être, even now that the colonial empires have been dissolved, is to maintain a French or a British interest in the Islamic world. For a number of other reasons such scholars on the whole tend to be humanists, not social scientists, and their support in the general culture comes less from the postindustrial cult of expertise (which exists in both countries) than from broad intellectual and moral currents in the society. Rodinson in France is a great philologist who is also a well-known Marxist; the late Hourani in England was a famous historian and a man whose work represents an evident liberalism. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 331
Categorization
- XREF: The colonial-administration origin of Islamic expertise contrasts with the US expertise-as-crisis-management model — echoes the institutional-designation theme in the Milgrom trade-institutions work.