Islamic Orientalists’ estrangement produced superiority, not self-understanding, cementing Islam as original cultural affront

Evidence

Now one of the striking differences between Orientalism in its Islamic version and all the other humanistic disciplines where Auerbach’s notions on the necessity of estrangement have some validity is that Islamic Orientalists never saw their estrangement from Islam either as salutary or as an attitude with implications for the better understanding of their own culture. Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified their feelings of superiority about European culture, even as their antipathy spread to include the entire Orient, of which Islam was considered a degraded (and usually, a virulently dangerous) representative. … In addition, I think, the likelihood was very great that European scholars would continue to see the Near Orient through the perspective of its Biblical “origins,” that is, as a place of unshakably influential religious primacy. Given its special relationship to both Christianity and Judaism, Islam remained forever the Orientalist’s idea (or type) of original cultural effrontery, aggravated naturally by the fear that Islamic civilization originally (as well as contemporaneously) continued to stand somehow opposed to the Christian West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 669

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia field: the mechanism whereby scholarly distance becomes contempt and fear, rather than understanding, is exactly the dynamic later readings deploy against contemporary analysts of Islam.
• SEED: Possible angle: how the ‘original cultural effrontery’ framing—Islam as the first audacious challenger to Christian/Jewish primacy—persists in contemporary discourse about Muslim visibility and assertiveness in Europe.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 669