Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance.

Evidence

Knowledge of other cultures, then, is especially subject to “unscientific” imprecision and to the circumstances of interpretation. Nevertheless, we can say tentatively that knowledge of another culture is possible, and it is important to add, desirable, if two conditions are fulfilled — which, incidentally, are precisely the two conditions that today’s Middle East or Islamic studies by and large do not fulfill. One, the student must feel that he or she is answerable to and in uncoercive contact with the culture and the people being studied. As I said earlier, most of what the West knew about the non-Western world it knew in the framework of colonialism; the European scholar therefore approached his subject from a general position of dominance, and what he said about this subject was said with little reference to what anyone but other European scholars had said. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Said’s Orientalism thesis into a two-condition test for genuine cross-cultural knowledge. — connects to: A fixed polemical image of Islam served Western needs better than firsthand observation did.; English empire turned literary anti-Muslim stereotypes into dominant colonization ideology — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 153

Related

• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.86)
• European awareness of Islam stems from direct colonial and demographic experience (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.85)
• Western scholars controlled the academic study of the Orient even as late as 1927. (similarity 0.84)
• Western apprehension of Islam is moral and cosmological, not empirical. (similarity 0.84)
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• European scholarship on Islam turned disinterested only once Islam ceased threatening Europe. (similarity 0.84)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial administrator attitudes toward the Orient formed a shared consensus (similarity 0.84)
• American obsession with Islam is secondhand because America lacks a colonial past (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial expansion widened geographic knowledge but kept Europe at the privileged center (similarity 0.83)
• British control of the Orient depended on constantly refined knowledge of it (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship expanded in tandem with European imperial conquest. (similarity 0.83)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. (similarity 0.83)