Many Orientalists wrote directly for Muslim and Arab audiences

Evidence

‘None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an Oriental as a reader,’ wrote Said in a later article. So why on earth did Hamilton Gibb write articles in Arabic? Why does Said not discuss Gibb’s ‘Khawatir fi-Adab al-Arabi’ (‘Reflections on Arabic Literature’)? What about all the Western contributors to Muslim World and Islamic Culture, both periodicals with a largely Muslim Indian readership? And what about Lewis’s evident pride in his being translated into Arabic, Persian and Turkish? — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 533

Categorization

• SHARE: A pointed factual rebuttal to send to anyone who credits Said’s claim that Orientalists never addressed Oriental readers.

Related

• Arab critics attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and misrepresenting Islam (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism also suppressed Arab scholars and drew on Arab precursors (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist texts were designed for Western readers, not Oriental ones. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist discourse was addressed exclusively to Western audiences, never to Orientals (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.83)
• Prominent critics of Orientalism have praised scholars deeply complicit in its assumptions. (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s Orientalism targets the Middle East, not the Far East. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship privileged a monolithic textual Islam over lived human realities (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.82)
• Said never corrected factual errors in Orientalism and refused to concede points (similarity 0.82)
• Major Orientalist scholarship was published in Latin into the twentieth century. (similarity 0.82)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists like Gibb and Massignon ultimately served the colonialist discourse. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholars impose external analytical categories that Muslims themselves would not recognize (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism is inadequate for refashioning the discipline. (similarity 0.82)