Hierarchical Arab universities and limited access to Western work explain methodological stagnation

Evidence

Conermann went on to identify the causes of the perceived problem as being, first, the old-fashioned hierarchical structure of Arab universities which obliged the students to defer to their professors with their dated scholastic agendas, and secondly, the restricted access Arab scholars had to recent Western publications, and consequently and thirdly, their failure to keep up with the methodological debates of recent decades. There is still no Arabic equivalent of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 429

Categorization

• XREF: The hierarchy-and-access explanation parallels the institutional analysis of how knowledge regimes lag behind dominant ones in other regions.