Said’s critique targeted not scholars’ pro-Orient sympathies but their presumption of East-West difference

Evidence

I remarked earlier, this generation of European scholars as well as the one before them had garnered a kind of erudition in both language proficiency and area expertise that was to disappear, in large measure, from the field after World War II. This was the true philology that imperialist and colonialist Europe produced. … What matters to us in Said is that Massignon’s fault was not his sympathies and endless advocacy of the Muslim and Palestinian causes, or the stereotypical distinctions he made between Arab and Persian Sufis, but his insistence that a fundamental “difference” existed between the modern West and Islam, the former being eo ipso modern, while the latter belonging to an ancient civilization. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 353

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly distinguishes a legitimate scholarly recognition of civilizational difference from the Orientalist ‘difference’ Said and Hallaq indict? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Echoes the point in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ about how even sympathetic outsiders project temporal/teleological frameworks onto non-Western societies.