Marxist critics saw Orientalist knowledge production as colonial accomplice
Evidence
Tibawi, who criticized the Orientalists from a traditional Islamic stance, still retained a certain respect for Hamilton Gibb. But for the Moroccan historian and novelist Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) and other secular-minded Marxist critics, Gibb was the enemy par excellence. Laroui, writing in L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine (1967), declared that Gibb’s Orientalism was the worst sort, as it had broken with the Germano-French school of erudition and presented itself as empiricism, which was a cover for generalized pontificating. … Laroui was strongly influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, by Gramsci’s ideas about the manufacture by intellectuals of consent to the hegemony of the ruling class. As Laroui saw it, the Orientalist’s production and administration of a specialized kind of knowledge made him an accomplice of the colonialist. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 586
Categorization
- XREF: Laroui’s Gramscian reading of Orientalism is a direct precursor to Said’s argument in Orientalism; also maps onto the knowledge-power analysis in Foucault.
- DEEPTHINKING: The layered genealogy — traditionalist Tibawi vs. Marxist Laroui both rejecting Orientalism for opposite reasons, and Laroui’s Gramsci filter — resists a one-line summary.