Pre-modern Islam conquered and ruled but never produced a discipline like Orientalism

Evidence

Since Said’s singular accomplishment in Orientalism is the links he made between Orientalism as a scholarly discipline and political power, I wish to ask why knowledge and power, both of which have existed since time immemorial, have never produced such an intricate and inextricable association in any other place or time in the world. My purpose in engaging this question is to try to demonstrate the qualitatively singular structure and thus special meaning of Orientalism as a modern standard. To do so, I turn—in a conscious move against dominant postcolonial and poststructuralist critique—to a comparative case study of substantial magnitude, in geographical, cultural, intellectual, literary, pedagogical, political, legal, and military terms, to name only a few. I will focus on Islam before the eighteenth century, a civilization that once extended its dominions, much as modern Europe did, over a large surface of the world known then (by military force in the beginning, of course, but mostly through missionary activity in later centuries). Much like Europe, it also conquered and ruled; it had its scholars, intellectuals, educational practices and institutions, not to mention a massive mercantile and agricultural economy that made it one of the richest constellations of empires in the world. Yet, like its Indian and Chinese counterparts, it did not develop anything like Orientalism. Why? — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 143

Categorization

• SEED: Strong essay hook: if domination alone explains Orientalism, why didn’t the Islamic empires—as conquerors—develop an ‘Occidentalism’ to study Europe? The asymmetry itself is the interesting phenomenon.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: was there truly no Islamic scholarly apparatus for studying Europe, or did it exist in different institutional form (e.g. diplomacy manuals, captivity narratives)?
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Muslim ideology produced no oppressive systems before postwar MENA empire