German historicists mined Islamic history for arguments about civilization
Evidence
The Orient was pillaged by German historians and religious thinkers for material that they could use in more general debates about the future of civilization, the nature of culture and the primacy of ideas in historical evolution. Leopold von Ranke’s grandiose vision of world history cast a long shadow and the Cinderella subject of Islamic history was mostly conducted under that shadow. In the twentieth century, German historicism would give way to theories and methodologies pioneered by British and American historians and sociologists, and Orientalists would take their lead from them. Finally, it is noteworthy that the Americans had yet to make a significant contribution to the field. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 332
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: This account of how a non-Western field was ‘pillaged’ as raw material for Western civilizational debates is exactly the instrumentalizing pattern that ‘On Sacrifice’ documents for its own subject.
Related
- Ranke’s secular historical method still hid a providential shaping agenda (similarity 0.80)
- Philological criticisms of Islam’s origins were read as Zionist or Crusader conspiracies (similarity 0.79)
- German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire. (similarity 0.79)
- German Orientalists favored text editing while German readers sought broader popular accounts. (similarity 0.79)
- Even leading European historians made sweeping negative generalizations about Islam (similarity 0.78)
- Islamic intellectual history already contains every claim native informers recycle as new (similarity 0.78)
- European secularization of history was partly caused by the Muslim advance (similarity 0.78)
- Iranian civilization dominated Islamic political and cultural power for centuries (similarity 0.78)