Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars

Evidence

To be sure, not all Orientalist scholarship was tied to the interests of empire. While Said acknowledges that fact, he also advances an analysis of Orientalism that has been criticized for its geographic essentialism, which is the notion all knowledge produced in the West about the East is necessarily ethnocentric. One of the first critics of Orientalism, sociologist Anouar Abdel-Malek, notes that Orientalists produced valuable knowledge. Some, however, advised governments and played an important role in enabling colonization—such as Silvestre de Sacy, an important Orientalist who influenced generations of scholars. Hourani observes that some Orientalists opposed the imperial policies of their countries; examples include E. G. Brown in England, who supported the constitutional revolution in Iran, and the French Louis Massignon, who supported the Algerian movement for independence. Iranian studies professor Hamid Dabashi defends the work of Orientalist scholar Ignaz Goldziher and draws a distinction between Orientalists who “heavily invested in producing a particular knowledge of Islam and Muslims compatible with European colonial interests” and those like Goldziher, who was an anti-colonial activist in Egypt. Orientalism is thus a complex and contradictory body of scholarly work and field of institutional knowledge. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 163

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Defines ‘geographic essentialism’ as the notion that all Western knowledge about the East is necessarily ethnocentric.

Related

• Orientalist scholarship was internally diverse and historically contingent, not monolithic (similarity 0.86)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist scholarship was internally divided between empire servants and anti-colonial critics (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist dissenters defended Islam’s internal diversity against essentializing stereotypes (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist scholarship varied internally but shared the racial category (similarity 0.85)
• Even brilliant, anti-colonial Orientalists produced scholarship rooted in colonial interests (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship supplied the knowledge base that justified colonial rule (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.84)
• Prominent critics of Orientalism have praised scholars deeply complicit in its assumptions. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship expanded in tandem with European imperial conquest. (similarity 0.84)
• Knowledge-producing disciplines were mobilized in service of imperialist worldviews (similarity 0.84)
• Centuries of Orientalist scholarship have functioned as domination and violence (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.83)