Michaelis subordinated Arabic study to biblical understanding

Evidence

But he had no doubt that the study of Arabic and the contemporary Middle East should be subordinated to the study of Hebrew and the Bible and it was he who was the mastermind behind the Danish expedition to Egypt and the Arabian peninsula in the years 1761 to 1767, a scholarly venture that can be considered as the paradigmatic Orientalist penetration of the Islamic lands. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 231

Related

• Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible (similarity 0.88)
• Biblical textual criticism drove the era’s Arabic scholarship (similarity 0.85)
• Arabist and Islamic studies resisted the revision that reformed other area studies (similarity 0.80)
• Expedition members treated living Arabs as evidence about ancient Hebrews (similarity 0.80)
• Early Arabic scholarship served Bible study, not the study of Islam itself. (similarity 0.79)
• Western study of Islamic texts long ignored living Muslims and their culture (similarity 0.78)