Said treated the modern crisis as purely political, never epistemic

Evidence

If one part of the causes was in effect nonexistent and the other the locus of utter silence, then we must conclude that for Said the crisis was at best political in nature, having to do with the fall of empires (British, French, Dutch), who were probably alone in thinking of their decline as a crisis. This interpretation of Said is consistent with all his other views about problems in modernity, including that which mattered most to him—the question of Palestine. All of them for him were political, essentially related to empire and its malevolent power. That these were sourced in the deep epistemic structures of the modernity that gave him his own secular humanism and liberal values is a question that he seems to have never entertained. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 326

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader debate about whether postmodern critique engages the metaphysical/epistemic roots of modernity vs. only its political symptoms — parallel to arguments in decolonial thought (e.g., what Mignolo would call ‘epistemic disobedience’).