Key Orientalist scholarship shows no detectable political agenda even unconscious
Evidence
But if one actually sits down and reads Pococke’s edition of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, or Cresswell on the chronology of Egyptian mosques, or Cahen on the topography of Syria in the Middle Ages, or de Slane on the classification of manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale, or Charles Burnett on the transmission of Arabic learning in medieval England, it is extremely difficult to detect a political agenda in such scholarship – even an unconscious one. There are such things as pure scholars. I have even had tea with a few of them. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 545
Categorization
- CANDY: The final line — ‘I have even had tea with a few of them’ — is a delightfully dry rebuttal.
- XREF: connects to: Orientalist ideas can circulate without imperial power structures
Related
- Scholarship cannot be politically neutral (similarity 0.82)
- Anti-Orientalist critics ignored the actual scholarly merits of Orientalist findings (similarity 0.81)
- Orientalist ideas can circulate without imperial power structures (similarity 0.81)
- Sustained national imperial interest was required for Orientalist scholarship to thrive (similarity 0.80)
- Orientalism undermines the possibility of nonpolitical scholarship. (similarity 0.80)
- Learned Orientalist scholarship pressed ideological myths into service (similarity 0.80)
- All scholarly knowledge production is shaped by the scholar’s political circumstances. (similarity 0.80)
- Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars (similarity 0.80)
- Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.79)
- Ideas about the Orient drawn from scholarship are readily put to political use (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship supplied the knowledge base that justified colonial rule (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.79)
- Institutional Orientalism, not all Orientalist scholarship, served colonial power (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalism’s claim to scholarly attention rests on its uniqueness among fields (similarity 0.78)