Scholarly hostility to Shi’ism distorted Orientalist accounts of Islam

Evidence

Massignon disliked Shi’a Islam in large part because he believed that the Shi’as were responsible for his hero’s death. He seems to have thought of Shi’ism as an early version of conspiratorial proto-Freemasonry or communism. Ironically his hostility to Shi’ism led him to underestimate the actual influence of this version of Islam on al-Hallaj’s thinking. (Incidentally, Massignon’s lifelong prejudice against Shi’ism was quite widely shared by Orientalists in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Such grand figures as Goldziher and Hamilton Gibb presented Islamic history from a point of view that was unthinkingly Sunni in its perspective. Shi’ism was seen as a peculiarly backward and superstitious form of Islam that had no future. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was to change perceptions.) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 401

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with Said’s critique of Orientalism and how scholarly blind spots track political/religious prejudice; also connects to the 1979 Iranian revolution reshaping academic perception.

Related

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