Western claims about Arab scientific incapacity rested on negligible acquaintance
Evidence
Kurd ‘Ali denounced the triumphalism of the West and declared the European conquest of America to be a great crime. Like the nineteenth-century Islamic philosopher and political activist al-Afghani, he tried to rebut Ernest Renan’s thesis that the Arabs, because of their Semitic mindset, were innately anti-scientific. Kurd ‘Ali suggested that the only Arabs that Renan had ever met were Syrian fishermen and, on that basis, he had decided that Arabs were innately anti-science. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 566
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: the mismatch between confident civilizational verdicts and the thin sample of actual people informing them — a recurring pattern from Renan to contemporary takes.
- CANDY: Renan basing a sweeping civilizational judgment on some Syrian fishermen he once met is a fun, self-contained anecdote.