Orientalist scholarship was internally divided between empire servants and anti-colonial critics

Evidence

In his Post-Orientalism, Hamid Dabashi eloquently critiques Said’s sweeping brush by noting the attributes of I. Goldziher, one of the greatest Orientalists to have lived. Like Massignon, Goldziher was an “exemplary scholar of unsurpassed brilliance, … a humanist with a vast catholicity of learning rarely seen among his peers, a politically alert and intellectually diligent activist who opposed colonialism of all sorts as a matter of moral principle.” Yet, Dabashi duly recognizes that “Goldziher’s scholarship was integral to a mode of knowledge production at once exceedingly productive and insightful and yet at its very epistemic root predicated on European colonial interests in what they called the ‘Orient.’ ” See Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 107–8. We should remind ourselves that it was also Goldziher who single-handedly destroyed, via that epistemic root, the entire edifice of Islam’s prophetic traditions (hadith), an act raised to perfection by Said’s Columbia colleague, Joseph Schacht. More importantly, it is the absence of this type of “root” from Guénon that marks this latter as, first, a different type of author and as, second, representing a genuine refutation of Said’s categorical brush. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 855 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Even brilliant, anti-colonial Orientalists produced scholarship rooted in colonial interests (similarity 0.93)
• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars (similarity 0.86)
• Institutional Orientalism, not all Orientalist scholarship, served colonial power (similarity 0.85)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.83)
• Said contradicts Orientalism by treating Western literatures as autonomous. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship produced knowledge about the Orient that Orientals themselves did not possess (similarity 0.82)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism is inadequate for refashioning the discipline. (similarity 0.82)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists like Gibb and Massignon ultimately served the colonialist discourse. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship was overwhelmingly dominated by Western scholars into the 1920s (similarity 0.82)
• Centuries of Orientalist scholarship have functioned as domination and violence (similarity 0.82)
• Dismissing Orientalism as bad faith ignores its material scholarly functions. (similarity 0.82)
• Academic Orientalist expertise legitimizes rather than corrects crude stereotypes (similarity 0.81)
• Said indicted Orientalism while letting other Western disciplines pass unscathed (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool #corroborates (0.93)
• Orientalism was internally contradictory rather than a monolithic colonial tool. #corroborates (0.93)
• Even brilliant, anti-colonial Orientalists produced scholarship rooted in colonial interests #complicates (0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 855