Islamic Orientalism was intellectually backward compared to other human sciences

Evidence

What I am describing, then, is something that will characterize Islamic Orientalism until the present day: its retrogressive position when compared with the other human sciences (and even with the other branches of Orientalism), its general methodological and ideological backwardness, and its comparative insularity from developments both in the other humanities and in the real world of historical, economic, social, and political circumstances. … Some awareness of this lag in Islamic (or Semitic) Orientalism was already present towards the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps because it was beginning to be apparent to some observers how very little either Semitic or Islamic Orientalism had shaken itself loose from the religious background from which it originally derived. … The first Orientalist congress was organized and held in Paris in 1873, and almost from the outset it was evident to other scholars that the Semiticists and Islamicists were in intellectual arrears, generally speaking. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 671

Categorization

• SHARE: R. N. Cust’s 1897 survey of Orientalist congresses noting the Semitic-Islamic field’s intellectual arrears is a niche historical tidbit worth sending to someone interested in the institutional history of area studies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 671
• XREF: connects to: The decline-of-Islamic-science narrative is a Eurocentric fabrication.