Islamic Orientalism treats resistance to change as the Orient’s essential trait

Evidence

Thus, in order properly to understand the intellectual genealogy of interwar Islamic Orientalism—as it is most interestingly and satisfyingly seen (no irony intended) in the careers of Massignon and Gibb—we must be able to understand the differences between the Orientalist’s summational attitude towards his material and the kind of attitude to which it bears a strong cultural resemblance, that in the work of philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius. The intellectual crisis in Islamic Orientalism was another aspect of the spiritual crisis of “late bourgeois humanism”; in its form and style, however, Islamic Orientalism viewed the problems of mankind as separable into the categories called “Oriental” or “Occidental.” It was believed, then, that for the Oriental, liberation, self-expression, and self-enlargement were not the issues that they were for the Occidental. … Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilization but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other. When Gibb opposed nationalism in the modern Islamic states, he did so because he felt that nationalism would corrode the inner structures keeping Islam Oriental; the net result of secular nationalism would be to make the Orient no different from the West. Yet it is a tribute to Gibb’s extraordinarily sympathetic powers of identification with an alien religion that he put his disapproval in such a way as to seem to be speaking for the Islamic orthodox community. How much such pleading was a reversion to the old Orientalist habit of speaking for the natives and how much it was a sincere attempt at speaking in Islam’s best interests is a question whose answer lies somewhere between the two alternatives. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 675

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the whole core theme of Orientalism (the Orient constructed as changeless, backward ‘Other’) that the later Islamophobia readings build on; and to ‘speaking for the natives’ which ties to the liberal/colonial discourse critiques in later module texts.
• DEFINE: Introduces the key move: the Orientalist ‘summational’ attitude renders Eastern liberation and modernity unthinkable, defining the Orient by its resistance to change.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing later: how does Massignon’s sympathetic identification complicate, rather than merely repeat, the Orientalist speaking-for-natives habit?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 675