Orientalist scholarship presents Islamic history as dull and opaque to outsiders

Evidence

Take the Abbasid period from the eighth to the eleventh century as an instance. Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with Arab or Islamic history will know that it was a high point of Islamic civilization, as brilliant a period of cultural history as the High Renaissance in Italy. Yet nowhere in the forty pages of description does one get an inkling of any richness; what is found instead is sentences like this: “Once master of the caliphate, [al-Ma’mun] seemed henceforth to shrink from contact with Baghdad society and remained settled at Merv, entrusting the government of Iraq to one of his trusted men, al-Hasan b. Sahl, the brother of al-Fadl, who was faced almost at once with a serious Shi’i revolt, that of Abu’l-Saraya, who in Jumada II 199/January 815 sent out a call to arms from Kufa in support of the Hasanid Ibn Tabataba.” A non-Islamicist will not know at this point what a Shi’i or a Hasanid is. He will have no idea what Jumada II is, except that it clearly designates a date of some sort. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 767

Categorization

• XREF: Exemplifies the representation-of-the-Other mechanism that later Islamophobia readings will extend; connects to Said’s core argument about how expertise produces a flattened, unreadable Orient.
• SEED: Angle: how dense, unattributed jargon in expert discourse functions as a gatekeeping device that fabricates the very unreadability it laments.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 767