The Encyclopaedia of Islam asked European questions, not Muslim ones, about Islam

Evidence

The historian of medieval Islam, R. Stephen Humphreys, has observed that the first edition of the Encyclopaedia represents ‘a specifically European interpretation of Islamic civilization. The point is not that this interpretation is “wrong”, but that the questions addressed in these volumes often differ sharply from those which Muslims have traditionally asked about themselves.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 338

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later ‘Enemies of Orientalism’ chapter prefigured here, and to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist interpretation.

Related

• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.83)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval European misinformation about Islam came from polemical needs, not ignorance. (similarity 0.83)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.83)
• European study of Islam originates in fear, not curiosity, and that hostility persists today. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Islam was the default framework through which Europe first knew all of the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist categories can contradict what Muslims would say about themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s Orientalism critique has done more harm than good, delegitimizing the search for knowledge, ignoring Muslim scholars’ positive contributions, and denigrating real threats like Islamist… (similarity 0.81)
• Philological criticisms of Islam’s origins were read as Zionist or Crusader conspiracies (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s Orientalism targets the Middle East, not the Far East. (similarity 0.81)
• “Orient” never meant the Islamic world in medieval English (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist historiography reduces Islam to dynastic chronology while omitting its religious and doctrinal substance. (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Europeans could not distinguish the Qur’an from other Islamic books. (similarity 0.81)
• Academic Islamic studies began only with eighteenth-century Orientalism (similarity 0.81)