Interwar Orientalists paralleled Western humanists in reading texts from the specific to the general

Evidence

Therefore, in the best Orientalist work done during the interwar period—represented in the impressive careers of Massignon and Gibb himself—we will find elements in common with the best humanistic scholarship of the period. Thus the summational attitude of which I spoke earlier can be regarded as the Orientalist equivalent of attempts in the purely Western humanities to understand culture as a whole, antipositivistically, intuitively, sympathetically. Both the Orientalist and the non-Orientalist begin with the sense that Western culture is passing through an important phase, whose main feature is the crisis imposed on it by such threats as barbarism, narrow technical concerns, moral aridity, strident nationalism, and so forth. The idea of using specific texts, for instance, to work from the specific to the general (to understand the whole life of a period and consequently of a culture) is common to those humanists in the West inspired by the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as to towering Orientalist scholars like Massignon and Gibb. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 665

Categorization

• XREF: Dilthey’s hermeneutic ‘specific-to-general’ method connects to Gadamer/Heidegger lineage the reader will meet in other critical-theory scaffolding.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 665