Orientalist silence about Islamic rule of law legitimizes imposing Western democracy

Evidence

In all that Orientalism produced about Islamic forms of government and politics, there is a resounding silence over the relationship of these forms to the rule of law. As I have shown elsewhere, this silence, as silence, is the function of a discourse that was programmatically geared to justify the imposition of Western notions of democracy and political freedom on the Islamic world through the creation of a narrative of “Oriental despotism” that presumably dictated the conditions of political rule in Islam. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to prior work on the ‘Oriental despotism’ narrative and parallels the argument about how knowledge discourse encodes colonial policy prescriptions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 780