Western study of Islamic history moved from credulity to critical method to total rejection

Evidence

The study of Islamic history in the Western world has gone through three phases. In the first, historians believed everything they were told. They read chronicles, were impressed by their detail, quantity, and manifest concern for accuracy, and so assumed that whatever they said was true. Then came a second phase, when the great nineteenth-century scholars began to apply critical method, treating Muslim historians in the same way they had treated Greek, Latin, and their own historians, trying to detect biases, distortions, variant ver­ sions and so on. Here I am thinking particularly of the work of such founding fathers of our discipline as de Goeje, Wellhausen, Caetani and others. Then more recently comes a third phase, of almost total rejection. It is all false, it is all invented; we know absolutely nothing. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1963

Categorization

• XREF: This tripartite periodization parallels the Said-adjacent account of how the Islamic world was progressively made legible and then ‘unreadable’ to Western scholarship.
• SEED: The shift from nineteenth-century critical skepticism to twentieth-century ‘total rejection’ as a historiographical mood is an angle for how Western legibility of Islam inverted into total illegibility.