Scholarship comes with grave ethical responsibility because knowledge is never innocent of power

Evidence

If we assume, as we should, that knowledge is never innocent of the social, conceptual, material, political, and power networks within which it is cultivated, then engaging in knowledge production—inter alia the mission and, indeed, raison d’être of the scholar—comes with a grave ethical and moral responsibility, but one that can no longer be formed through the liberal tradition or exclusively within the central domains’ discursive formations. As an instrument of power and one that in modernity stands in dialectical relationship with it, knowledge is a weapon that can inflict cruel violence, including, as we have seen, genocide and much else. To cultivate it within an ethical framework is to engage, first and foremost, in a series of self-interrogations about the justifiability of the very concept of scholarship in the first place: Why, that is, choose to enter into this domain of production? What forms of scholarship are ethically justifiable and what forms are not? How can a scholar, through a specific and precisely formulated research project, partake in ethical self-formation? — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 518

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s power-knowledge analysis and to the broader postcolonial literature on academic complicity that Hallaq is drawing on throughout this book. — connects to: Education is never neutral and either suppresses or liberates communities — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 332; Scholarly work is never neutral but can still stay open to contrary evidence; Scholarship is never neutral, so honesty requires declaring one’s standpoint
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that scholarship itself must be ethically interrogated at the level of topic choice, not just method or results, is a dense positional argument that resists easy summary — genuinely paradigm-shifting for anyone who takes it in.