Orientalism as a field masks deeper crises in modern epistemology

Evidence

I shall insist that the problems underlying Orientalism are so expansive and profound that the entire discipline, along with the emerging critique and defense of it, has functioned as a discursive mask to cover up serious crises in late-modern epistemology. Surely not to be exonerated in the least, Orientalism has nonetheless been structurally and systemically scapegoated, a phenomenon that I regard as having the function of emplotment that is aimed at suppressing the real forces that precipitate the actions that it is accused of performing and the attributes that it is accused of having. To anticipate some of my conclusions, it is with the structure and system that have produced and enveloped Orientalism that, I argue, we must begin and end. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 23

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that a heated academic debate functions as a ‘discursive mask’ suppressing deeper structural problems resonates with the moral-panic literature and with how controversies can displace systemic analysis. — connects to: Philology rather than epistemology anchored Orientalist knowledge claims about Islam
• DEEPTHINKING: The move of rescaling a whole discipline’s debate from ‘bias in one field’ to ‘a mask over late-modern epistemological crisis’ is the kind of paradigm-shift claim that reorients how one reads the entire controversy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 23