Robert Irwin — For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies

339 published claims from this book.

• ‘Arabist’ once meant someone reading Greek only through Arabic
• A 1779 French memo proposed invading Egypt as liberators
• A doomed homosexual passion shaped a great Orientalist’s entire life
• A fabricated Christian polemic long served as Western Europe’s main source on Muhammad
• A fourteenth-century Egyptian had sounder monetary theory than modern Europeans
• A French jeweller assessed Safavid Persia as industrially ahead of Europe
• A hard-drinking novelist seeded the rhetoric of Iran’s Islamic revolution
• A marginal mad scholar nonetheless seeded the Orientalist tradition
• A pioneer of Qur’anic scholarship ended in confessed bewilderment at its subject.
• A refugee scholar translated Ibn Khaldun into English and studied hashish in Islam
• A Savilian professor bribed an Ottoman soldier to steal Ptolemy’s Almagest.
• A scholar could enter Orientalism for aesthetic obscurity rather than imperial purpose
• A scholar’s bad faith need not invalidate the accuracy of their findings.
• A scholar’s ideological agenda does not invalidate the findings of their research
• A scholarly courtesy to a French academic cost Kratchkovsky nine months in jail
• A thirteenth-century missionary praised Muslim virtue to shame Christians
• A Turkish bibliographer’s catalog shaped European Orientalism’s image of Islam
• A twelfth-century Arabic philosophical fable shaped English empiricism and Robinson Crusoe
• A Victorian Orientalist mastered Romany, mesmerism, and multiple languages without formal schooling
• Academic Orientalism and Orientalist art were separate rather than one discourse
• Academic Orientalists eclipsed gentleman amateurs in the RAS
• Accepting one’s own suffering can relieve others’ burden of sin
• Advanced textual analysis did not beat naive compilation in finding historical truth
• Aeschylus staged his victory as tragedy from the enemy’s viewpoint
• Al-i Ahmad framed Western influence as a hollowing-out infestation
• American Middle East studies depended on recruited British and European Orientalists
• American Orientalism recruited many prominent Arab-born scholars
• American Orientalism was a German-influenced latecomer to the field
• An early history of Persian religion relied on anachronistic Islamic-era sources
• An encounter with al-Hallaj’s teachings triggered Massignon’s Catholic conversion
• An influential historical model persisted for decades without direct evidence
• Ancient insider-outsider boundaries were permeable through cultural adoption
• Annemarie Schimmel mastered six Oriental languages and fused Lutheran Christianity with Sufism.
• Anquetil-Duperron used Indian knowledge to refute Montesquieu’s Oriental despotism claims
• Anti-Orientalist critics ignored the actual scholarly merits of Orientalist findings
• Anti-Orientalist polemicists made basic historical and source-language errors
• Anti-Orientalists often relied on the very German scholarship they condemned
• Applying German textual criticism to the Bible cost a Scottish professor his chair
• Aquinas held Muslims convertible by argument and opposed forced conversion
• Arab critics attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and misrepresenting Islam
• Arabic numerals actually originated in India, not Arabia
• Arthur Waley preferred self-taught status to an academic chair
• Aryan racial ideology originated partly in Brahman caste distinctions
• Averroes taught that reason and faith need not harmonize
• Averroes’s philosophy was more influential in Christian Europe than in the Islamic world
• Avicenna’s medical Canon was being discarded as modern medicine advanced
• Becker judged Islamic society defective against a list of European institutional achievements.
• Belief that Jews’ mass conversion must precede the end of the world drove missions
• Bernard Lewis coined the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’, which Huntington popularized
• Bernard Lewis held that the West’s triumph leaves Islam to accept Western modernity
• Bernard Lewis’s politics obscured his genuine sympathy for Arab culture
• Biblical authority made Europeans resist accepting America as new
• Biblical source-criticism techniques inevitably transferred to studying early Islam
• Biblical textual criticism drove the era’s Arabic scholarship
• Brilliant scholars can pursue elaborate pattern-seeing delusions
• Britain neglected Oriental studies while France and Germany led the field
• Britain secretly subsidized Arabic newspapers and textbooks to spread Orientalist ideas
• Britain’s ‘Other’ for self-definition was France, not the Orient
• Britain’s wartime stake in the Middle East founded its Oriental studies school
• British Arabic teaching before 1960 ignored spoken language entirely
• British classics dominance crowded out Oriental studies at universities
• British commercial empire in China did not spur Chinese academic study
• British imperial power over Muslims did not translate into oriental scholarship
• British scholars could devote careers to Islam while despising it
• British tradition romanticized Muslim Saracens and vilified Crusaders
• Cabinets of curiosity were institutional precursors of serious Orientalism
• Christians under early Islamic rule faced real but strictly limited tolerance
• Classical Greco-Roman education shaped British imperial governance
• Classical study shifted from imitating style to analyzing content and philosophy
• Coffee was long suspected in England because it was tainted with Islam
• Colonial officials took up Oriental studies out of boredom
• Columbus sailed to outflank Islam, not merely to explore
• Commercial treaties called Capitulations structured European trade with the Ottomans
• Comparative biblical philology was accused of breeding Islam, popery, and atheism
• Danish instructions told scholars to hide any contempt for Islam
• Dante mistook Muhammad for a lapsed Christian rather than a foreign figure
• De Maistre saw the French Revolution as a purifying blood sacrifice
• De Sacy projected his Jacobin Terror fears onto medieval Islamic sects
• Debating Said’s Orientalism degenerated into motive-attribution rather than argument.
• Decontextualized polemic becomes misread as straightforward history
• Devotional critics dismissed documented Muslim slave trading as un-Islamic
• Dionysius was no more Asiatic than his Theban kin
• Early archaeology treated living Arabs as invisible to their enterprise
• Early British India was more ethnically hybrid than usually assumed
• Early crusade chroniclers felt no need to fact-check a hated subject
• Early English Arabists judged Eastern wisdom superior to Western
• Early English orientalism served homegrown Anglican church-politics disputes
• Early English Qur’an translator was a lay London solicitor
• Early European Arabic dictionaries were built on medieval Arab lexicons plus Turkish aids
• Early European Islam scholarship served Christian infighting, not accurate study
• Early Islam scholarship was a weapon in intra-Christian polemics.
• Early Islam’s defining features may have developed outside Arabia rather than at the Hijaz
• Early medieval pilgrims could walk through Muslim Jerusalem unseeing
• Early modern Christians ranked Muslims inferior by faith, not by race
• Early modern Christians read Islam as divine punishment for Eastern schisms
• Early Orientalist guilt contradicts Said’s imperialism thesis
• Early orientalists pursued Arabic scholarship at ruinous personal cost
• Early Qur’an translators claimed missionary aims to dodge church censorship
• Early Western mathematics served astrology rather than science
• Eighteenth-century French Arabic instruction read classics but ignored spoken language
• Eighteenth-century Orientalism could not support a living
• Eighteenth-century readers saw Sale’s Qur’an portrait as too pro-Muslim
• Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible
• Erpenius used Turkish dictionaries to improve Arabic scholarship, though Europeans scorned Turkish itself
• Essentialism serves the rationalizing function of stereotypes more than accuracy does
• Euripides located irrationality within the individual, not the East
• European Orientalist knowledge depended heavily on native informants like Leo Africanus
• European printers lacking Arabic fonts forced scholars to transliterate Arabic into Hebrew
• European scholarship favored Arabic over the practically more useful Turkish
• European study of Arabic declined as hopes of finding scientific value in it faded
• Even a committed imperial scholar-administrator eventually turned against colonial policy.
• Even Islam’s first Christian critic treated the conquest as a passing annoyance
• Even sympathetic European scholarship ignored Islam’s living devotional spirituality
• Exile itself was central to Said’s intellectual self-fashioning
• Expedition members treated living Arabs as evidence about ancient Hebrews
• Fabricated hadiths retain value as records of later community debates
• Fake ancient Egyptian lore diverted early Egyptology into occult dead ends
• Field travel to the East shaped major Orientalist insights
• Foreign Office grants for strategic languages funded esoteric classical scholarship instead
• Franz Rosenthal’s enduring scholarly legacy rests on his Muqaddimah translation
• French thinkers rationalized Ottoman decline through several rival theories
• Gellner held that truth is independent of political virtue.
• German historicists mined Islamic history for arguments about civilization
• German Orientalists favored text editing while German readers sought broader popular accounts.
• German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire.
• Gibb supported Arab nationalism and denounced Zionism
• Gobineau’s actual racial pessimism contradicts his Nazi appropriation
• Gobineau’s Orientalist authority rested on amateur credentials
• Goldziher’s formulations remain the field’s basic underpinnings today
• Grand well-funded intellectual projects often end in dead ends
• Greek and Jewish outsider definitions were permeable, allowing assimilation.
• Hammer-Purgstall’s translators fabricated content by guessing from a few words
• Hermetic writings are post-Christian borrowings, not ancient Egyptian prophecy.
• Hierarchical Arab universities and limited access to Western work explain methodological stagnation
• Hodgson coined Islamdom and Islamicate to separate religion from culture
• Hostility to Islam could motivate sound, critical scholarship rather than crude polemic
• Ibn al-Haytham established light travels from object to eye
• Imperial ‘liberation’ ideology genuinely motivated volunteers and was preached in Arabic
• Incomprehensibility could shield heretical writings from punishment
• Individual religious spirtualists converted to Islam seeking a primordial tradition rejecting modernity
• Intellectually brilliant academics can be unable to train successors
• Islam has remained a dominant force in Middle Eastern life
• Islam was framed as a Mediterranean heir of Hellenism, not an Asiatic Other.
• Islamic law’s origins trace only to about a century after the Prophet’s death
• Jewish nineteenth-century Orientalists created the myth of a tolerant medieval Muslim golden age.
• Jewish scholars’ rabbinic training shaped critical Qur’anic approaches
• Jones established the Indo-European language family in 1786
• Key Orientalist scholarship shows no detectable political agenda even unconscious
• Kircher’s hieroglyph decipherment was entirely false but mystical
• Kratchkovsky mourned pupils cut down by wars and hardship in his memoir
• Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon remains unfinished decades after his death
• Learning Arabic so quickly got scholars accused of practicing magic
• Leiden dominated European Oriental studies for two centuries
• Levant Company chaplaincies functioned as covert studentships in Arabic studies.
• Lewis’s scholarship attacked Muslim racial-prejudice and slavery myths and probed Muslim disinterest in Europe
• Lewis’s war service shaped his lifelong focus on Arabic political terminology
• Lull absorbed Sufi practices and Arabic frame-tale structure into Christian devotion
• Lull admired Arabic culture while insisting Islam was false and its followers damned
• Lull bought a Moorish slave as his Arabic teacher and struck him
• Lull deemed Muslim conversion possible only once they were subdued
• Lull studied Arabic nine years out of fear the Mongols would convert to Islam
• Lull’s Ars Magna was a rotating-wheel device meant to convert Muslims by demonstration
• Lull’s early reading of al-Ghazali shaped his later Sufi-influenced works
• Lull’s novel Blanquerna ends with its pope-hero resigning to become a hermit
• Madrasas did not exist in the Muslim world until centuries later than commonly claimed
• Major Orientalist scholarship was published in Latin into the twentieth century.
• Mandate partition of the Ottoman empire redirected archaeological access to French and British scholars
• Mandeville’s fabricated travel book circulated in hundreds of manuscripts.
• Many Orientalists wrote directly for Muslim and Arab audiences
• Marx’s orientalism concerned land tenure and government, not racial feeling
• Marxist critics read the Qur’an as bourgeois ideology promising workers otherworldly paradise
• Marxist critics saw Orientalist knowledge production as colonial accomplice
• Marxist historians pioneered writing Near Eastern history from below.
• Marxist scholars interpreted early Islam as a political and economic movement.
• Massignon aimed to study Arabic in order to demolish the Qur’an
• Massignon argued Sufism grew from the Qur’an against prevailing orthodoxy
• Massignon helped shield a Nazi-collaborating Mufti from extradition.
• Massignon’s anti-Jewish prejudice blended religion and nationalism ambiguously.
• Massignon’s veneration of al-Hallaj contradicted mainstream Muslim judgment
• Medieval anti-Islamic scholarship often went unread for centuries
• Medieval Arabic grammar looked backward to Qur’anic-era speech rather than current usage
• Medieval Christian anti-Oriental prejudice is unsourced in Greek knowledge
• Medieval Christians framed Islam as an old heresy rather than a new religion
• Medieval church leaders disagreed over whether studying Islam was safe
• Medieval European misinformation about Islam came from polemical needs, not ignorance.
• Medieval Islamic craft guilds never existed as scholars once claimed.
• Medieval learned medicine based on Galen harmed patients more than folk remedies did
• Medieval Muslims feared Christian translators would steal credit for Arabic learning
• Medieval poems mirrored crusader indulgences as Saracen parody.
• Medieval poets projected a pagan trinity onto Muslims mirroring the Christian one
• Medieval polemicists recycled general accusations of Muslim vice without personal knowledge
• Medieval readers consumed travel fiction as entertainment, not fact.
• Medieval writers copied well-phrased passages as reusable tools rather than seeking originality
• Michaelis subordinated Arabic study to biblical understanding
• Middle Eastern scholars taught Oriental studies in Russian universities
• Mill and Macaulay dismissed Indian learning without knowing any Indian language
• Missionary justifications often masked purely intellectual interest in the exotic
• Montesquieu cherry-picked obscure Oriental examples to support any argument
• Much of what medieval Europe believed was Aristotle was actually pseudepigrapha by other authors
• Muslim polemicists accused Christians of corrupting scripture and polytheism
• Muslim theologians blocked Arabic printing for centuries as desecration
• Muslims held that Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures
• Nazi-era refugee scholars transplanted German Orientalist philology into modern Israel
• Nicholson disliked the very Arabic literature he professionally documented
• Nicholson first presented Sufi experience as genuinely valid
• Nineteenth-century Orientalism was amateur, aristocratic, and unrefereed
• Nineteenth-century Orientalists routinely collaborated with Arab and Turkish scholars
• Nineteenth-century Oxbridge was mostly clergyman training and idle gentility
• Nineteenth-century philologists saw language study as a science able to rebuild dead societies
• Nineteenth-century racists read Islamic sectarian splits as racial revolts
• Nöldeke pioneered historical dating of the Qur’anic suras that anchored later scholarship.
• Ockley’s Saracen history sparked Gibbon’s interest in Islam
• Only one of six Danish expedition members survived the journey
• Orientalism changed no scholarly practices and disturbed no imperialists
• Orientalism’s cult following grew among nonspecialists despite no corrections to its errors
• Orientalist scholars often spoke Arabic too classically for ordinary Arabs
• Orientalists and Islamic fundamentalists can converge on shared claims about Islam
• Orientalists did not invent racism, which already circulated in the street
• Ottoman advances drove European study of Islam through fear
• Ottoman decline let European merchants claim nearly diplomatic immunity
• Oxford’s Arabic chair defaulted on teaching and discouraged classes
• Patron-funded scholarship may produce better books than mass-market publishing
• Persian imperialism needed no ideological othering to justify conquest
• Persian was long misclassified as Semitic for want of proof otherwise
• Petrarch condemned Arab literature without having read it
• Philological criticisms of Islam’s origins were read as Zionist or Crusader conspiracies
• Port Royal grammarians held that language, thought, and reality perfectly mirror one another
• Post-war British Orientalism was dominated by right-wing patricians skeptical of Arab nationalism
• Postcolonial criticism developed a distinctive, often impenetrable prose style
• Postel traced Druze origins to ancient French Druids
• Poverty and debt imprisoned and killed an early English Arabist
• Practical linguists and learned elites never overlapped in studying the Ottoman world
• Printing initially amplified medieval texts rather than new knowledge
• Protestants treated biblical language study as a path to salvation.
• Published al-Tabari editions enabled analytic Islamic historiography
• Qur’anic voweling makes it unique for learning Arabic
• Qutb attributed Orientalist prejudice to inherited Crusader instincts
• Qutb declared modern Muslims effectively infidel pagans despite their nominal faith
• Rahman argued outsiders’ claims about Islam must be acceptable to Muslims
• Ranke’s secular historical method still hid a providential shaping agenda
• Reiske devoted his life to a field that would not reward him
• Renaissance scholars mined Hebrew Cabala to prove Christian truth
• Renan dismissed de Sacy as orthodox and lacking critical insight
• Renan’s Averroes study distorted sources to tell a Western rationalism fable
• Renan’s weak Arabic forced reliance on inaccurate Latin translations
• Rituals predate the mythologies and creeds built around them
• Roman numerals survived for centuries despite Arabic numerals’ superiority
• Roman wars with Persia produced no distinctive racist propaganda
• Romantic orientalism rejected Enlightenment reason in a search for lost wholeness
• Rome printed Arabic books chiefly to convert Eastern Christians
• Russia founded Oriental language schools to govern conquered Muslims
• Russian Orientalism grew directly out of imperial state-building
• Sacred geography overlays a buried and materially different Jerusalem
• Said consistently explained away the justifications of America’s enemies without endorsing them
• Said criticized scholars whose works he had not read
• Said distorted Marx’s writings in Orientalism
• Said invented a nonexistent school of Cluniac Orientalists
• Said judged Western media coverage of Muslim executions as worse than the executions
• Said lumped pro-independence scholars into one reductive lineage
• Said never corrected factual errors in Orientalism and refused to concede points
• Said studied Conrad because he too reinvented himself through writing
• Said was attacked from both Palestinian and Israeli camps.
• Said was hostile to Arab Christians despite their PLO role.
• Said’s claim about de Sacy’s role in Egypt’s expedition lacks evidence
• Said’s critique of Orientalism also suppressed Arab scholars and drew on Arab precursors
• Said’s imperialism critique only ever applies to Western empires.
• Said’s Palestinian identity was formed in exile from an Anglican colonial elite
• Said’s Palestinian-exile biography was partly fabricated and exposed in 1999
• Said’s polemic demoralized scholarship and drove an unavowed policy of Jewish exclusion.
• Said’s public polemic contrasted sharply with his private gentleness
• Said’s static-views claim nullifies Orientalism’s own historical impact
• Said’s sudden hostility to Geertz followed Geertz’s critical review of Said’s own book
• Schism and dissension signal a faith’s vitality and ongoing evolution
• Scholarly hostility to Shi’ism distorted Orientalist accounts of Islam
• Scholarly progress is driven by inherited tools, not individual genius
• Semites have no racial psychology and only reluctantly abandoned polytheism
• Seventeenth-century Europe punished study of Islam while permitting pagan classics
• Seventeenth-century hopes for scientific data in Arabic manuscripts proved false.
• Seventeenth-century Orientalist scholarship could ruin its practitioners financially and physically
• Seventeenth-century Oxford was a byword for scholarly stagnation until Laud reformed it.
• Sixteenth-century observers predicted Christian Europe’s defeat by the Ottomans
• Some nineteenth-century racists predicted non-white domination
• Source-critical Bible methods migrated to classical Greek texts
• Source-criticism of hadith was denounced as diabolical by a Harvard-trained Iranian scholar
• Soviet historiography explained Islam as bourgeois class ideology
• Soviet promises of Muslim freedom concealed campaigns of suppression
• Soviet scholars balanced anti-Islamic propaganda with recognition of Islam’s progressive movements
• Soviet scholars denied Muhammad existed and redated the Qur’an to the eleventh century
• Stereotypes can enable efficient thought rather than only distort it
• Stereotypes function primarily to rationalize prejudiced behavior.
• The abduction of Io from Argos triggered the legendary Europe-Asia conflict
• The Arab Islamic conquests swept across three continents with startling speed
• The Baphomet myth originated partly from rigged trials and fake artefacts
• The claim that Muslims cannot self-govern descends from Montesquieu’s climate theory.
• The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire
• The Council of Vienne founded Oriental language chairs for missionary work
• The Council of Vienne’s Arabic chairs were never actually established.
• The Description de l’Egypte founded Egyptology but not Arabic studies
• The dragoman system trained practical interpreters separately from academics
• The Encyclopaedia of Islam asked European questions, not Muslim ones, about Islam
• The famous alchemist Jabir was a whole corpus, not one man
• The first Arabic-to-Latin translations were mostly about divination
• The first Christian theologian of Islam served the Umayyad caliphs
• The first European Arabic grammar shaped the standard work still used today
• The first Orientalist was also a complete lunatic
• The First World War discredited German philology as a suspect discipline
• The Inquisition deemed Postel insane rather than heretical
• The Oriental-despotism frame legitimized Western empire as a civilizing burden.
• The origin date of Orientalism is contested among multiple competing candidates
• The Qur’an was first rendered into Latin in 1143 by an Englishman
• The Qur’an’s first European vernacular translation prioritized literary polish over fidelity
• The same Arabic authors were retranslated repeatedly across centuries because few manuscripts were available
• The Second World War transformed academic Orientalism in Britain
• The term ‘Orientalist’ initially meant a proponent of local rule in India
• The Thousand and One Nights was first edited for British administrators in Calcutta
• The West first learned of Ibn Khaldun through Leo Africanus
• The word Orientalist changed meaning repeatedly over two centuries
• Tibawi held that only Muslims could interpret Islam objectively
• Tibawi saw Arab scholars of the Orientalist mode as culturally alienated
• Turkish studies barely existed in Europe before the twentieth century
• Twentieth-century Orientalists shifted from writing for peers to writing for a lay public
• Vámbéry travelled Central Asia disguised as a dervish seeking the Magyar homeland
• Vámbéry’s dinner talk on Balkan superstitions inspired Stoker’s Dracula
• Victorian English scholarship’s grammar fixation dulled the university compared to the Continent
• Volney correctly predicted Muslim resistance would doom the Egyptian invasion
• Volney predicted the Ottoman empire’s dissolution on republican grounds
• Volney read Eastern despotism through classical republican categories, not exoticism
• Volney’s travel book was an anti-imperialist warning, not an invasion blueprint
• Watt’s economic-mecca thesis about Islam’s origins was later demolished by Patricia Crone
• Wellhausen applied biblical source-criticism techniques to Islamic history
• Wellhausen read pre-Islamic Arab lore as evidence for early Hebrew life
• Wellhausen’s Islamic-period preferences were shaped by German patriotism
• Werewolfism entered medieval medicine as folkloric lore recycled from ancient Greece
• Western academic training rejects providential explanations for historical events
• Western claims about Arab scientific incapacity rested on negligible acquaintance
• Western fear of the Ottomans collapsed within a few decades
• Western scholars saw Islam as withering until the Iranian revolution changed minds
• Western study of Islamic texts long ignored living Muslims and their culture
• William Jones mastered thirteen languages and sampled twenty-eight