Pre-modern Muslim scholars regarded Western history as lacking value and purpose

Evidence

In so far as there was a scholarly or scientific interest in the West, it was geographical. Muslim historians were not interested in the history of the outside world which, as they understood the value and purpose of history, lacked both value and purpose. Muslim theologians were little concerned with Christian doctrines—why after all should they be interested in an earlier and superseded form of God’s revelation? And for the few that were interested, better information was more easily accessible among the many Christian communities living in the lands of Islam. There was no interest in the sciences and arts of Europe. They knew there was nothing of the one; they assumed there was nothing of the other. Only the geographers show some interest in the West, and even that a limited one. One geographical writer even apologizes for devoting some attention to these remote and uninteresting places. His excuse is the need for completeness. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1060

Categorization

• XREF: A mirror-image of Said’s Orientalism: here the West is the disdained object of a knowledge tradition. Corroborates the claim that representation asymmetries run both ways and are not uniquely European. — connects to: Western scholarship is biased against narratives of Muhammad’s success
• QUESTION: Lewis’s framing — Muslims ‘knew there was nothing’ of European science — is itself a contested claim in Said-adjacent scholarship. Worth cross-checking against historians who argue for more sustained Ottoman/Muslim curiosity about Europe.