Philology rather than epistemology anchored Orientalist knowledge claims about Islam

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalism as a field masks deeper crises in modern epistemology — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 23; Orientalists claimed textual reading revealed the fixed essence of Muslims — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 179

Broader Connections

• Orientalism as a field masks deeper crises in modern epistemology #expands (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 23