Islamic intellectual history already contains every claim native informers recycle as new

Evidence

Neither discussion of the Judaic roots of Islam nor the association of both these world religions with various messianic movements in the region is new or revolutionary. The figure of Abdullah ibn Saba, a Jewish convert to Islam, for example, has always been affiliated with the rise of the Shi’i branch of Islam, by far the most messianic tendency evident in the faith. There is no blasphemy Ibn Warraq can produce that does not already have a long and rather varied Islamic social and intellectual history. The problem with the Orientalist mummies he brings back to life is their ignorance of their own obsolescence—except to the bewildered American generals who keep inviting Bernard Lewis to advise them on empire building. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 483

Related

• Every anti-Islamic charge already has a long indigenous Islamic intellectual history. (similarity 0.88)
• Islamic intellectual history is diverse, contested, and humanistic (similarity 0.84)
• Islamic doctrine has always been internally contested and reinterpreted (similarity 0.83)
• Radical and subversive thought has always been integral to Islamic history (similarity 0.82)
• Philological criticisms of Islam’s origins were read as Zionist or Crusader conspiracies (similarity 0.82)
• Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic civilization sustained vibrant internal doctrinal contestation and humanism. (similarity 0.81)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.80)
• Muslim intellectual critique long predates and exceeds Islamophobic polemic. (similarity 0.80)
• Conventional Islamic historiography is covertly molded by opposition to modern conditions (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism as colonial knowledge has been replaced by new propaganda (similarity 0.80)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.80)
• Muslims remember an era when Islam ruled as the Earth’s greatest civilization. (similarity 0.80)
• Islamic studies remains exempt from scholarly norms applied to other fields (similarity 0.80)
• Ibn Warraq marketed himself as the first secular Muslim doubter of Islam (similarity 0.80)