Sympathetic German Orientalism also enabled anti-imperialist critique of Western academia

Evidence

The “explosion of specialized knowledge about the East,” Marchand continues, “had destroyed the biblical foundations of European identity, and exploded the Graeco-centric world of the nineteenth century. Of course, it was the Arian strain that flourished under the Third Reich; but what we might call the Keyserling version was reborn again in the 1960s as a means to complete the critique of classical antiquity’s normativity, European imperialism, and the desiccation of the academy. We may well be, as Said argues, the heirs of the imperialist ‘gaze’; but we are perhaps equally the descendants of German orientalism, a much more ambiguous and irreversible strain of thought.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 534

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist scholarship was internally divided between empire servants and anti-colonial critics