The Orientalist scholar performs a secularized version of the priestly moral authority

Evidence

No less important, Sacy always felt himself to be a man standing at the beginning of an important revisionist project. He was a self-aware inaugurator, and more to the point of our general thesis, he acted in his writing like a secularized ecclesiastic for whom his Orient and his students were doctrine and parishioners respectively. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 336

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The secularized-ecclesiastic figure — Orient as doctrine, students as parishioners — connects directly to Gramsci’s organic intellectual and later readings on who authorizes knowledge about Islam.

Related

• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism operates as a secular quasi-religious faith akin to other nineteenth-century disciplines. (similarity 0.84)
• 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 0.83)
• Modern Orientalism secularized inherited Christian structures rather than gaining objective knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s error is essentializing both Orient and West from above (similarity 0.82)
• The Orientalist’s role shifted from guild scholar to representative of Western supremacy. (similarity 0.82)
• Religious scholarly devotion and governmental worldliness coexisted in leading Orientalists (similarity 0.82)
• The Orientalist cast himself as a heroic rescuer of a lost Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholars frame their work as restoring a vanished Orient for passive disciples. (similarity 0.82)
• Modern Orientalist knowledge descends from secularized Christian supernaturalism, not objective discovery (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist writing is pre-eminently a visual regime of expert and beholding self. (similarity 0.81)
• Learned Orientalist scholarship pressed ideological myths into service (similarity 0.81)
• The Orientalist’s claim to expertise depends on the Orient’s presumed incapacity for self-interpretation (similarity 0.81)