If academic writing is used as a weapon it must be used with good care and with responsibility. Neither of such qualities I find in these people. All they do is provocation and giving offensive remarks.
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They mostly (not everyone) use their writing to defame, dehumanize and provoke Muslims sentiment and of something that is not particular to Muslims. Infact Prof Joseph Massad wasn't joking when he said that the West and their minions in the Muslim world are everything they accuse
Muslims of. The culture of anti-democracy, domestic abuse, inequalities among different classes, misogyny (extreme hatred of women), etc. Now I don't want to start civilizational criticism let's me give some respond to @DrJavadTHashmi points.
Now i want to make it clear that post-Orientalist scholars and in Islamic Law in particular the post- Schachtian scholars are doing different job but still a good majority part of them are still intentional, filled with presuppositions.
1. To begin with, Javad argued that the decline narrative was dominant in the scholars (Orientalists). Javad is right here and this is the problem with Orientalism we are talking about. That is why we are always critical of Orientalist scholarship because of these blunders.
For instance, until 1930s till 1950s Orientalist scholars did not even believe of a possibility that Islam can have its own rational tradition and that a Muslim can be a philosopher. One such example is Hans H. Schaeder.
A scholar introduced himself to him as working on Islamic philosophy he said "but there no muslim philosophers".
I don't want Orientalist scholars to acknowledge us as capable of having our own rational and scientific tradition but m point is to show the general
I don't want Orientalist scholars to acknowledge us as capable of having our own rational and scientific tradition but m point is to show the general
attitude of Orientalism. And surprisingly Nabia Abbott was also a teaching at that time. Not just this even Prof Gibb, intentionally or not, did not acknowledged Ibn Khaldun's rational and scientific work because Arab mind in particular and Muslim in general is not capable of
Interpretating Greek-philosophical work. Goldziher and Schacht are in the same line. With such offensive and provocative views of Orientalists scholars, Muslims always being critical of them justify. Those who are aware Orientalism history would know that in the past
they not justify colonialism but planned and executed genocides and massacre. That is why for me Orientalism is destructive and genocidal in nature. Recent specialist of Middle Eastern studies in Israel, they are the forefront of justifying the genocide in Gaza.
Again I want to make it clear that my use of Orientalist scholars is not categorical brush, they were good scholars as well but 90% of them were vicious and anti-Islam. The post-orientalist scholars are way better but still I disagree with some of them.
The second thing Javad mentioned is that we always come up with Mustafa Al-A'zami works whenever they mentioned Schacht and Mustafa Al-A'zami work is not considered by the experts in the field and outdated.
Well, Izutsu excellent works never became a standard or even given important reference by experts in the field of early Islamic legal history.
Mustafa Al-A'zami criticism is acknowledged by many scholars still and It is common Orientalists are not the "only" experts in this field. It is common nature to the epistemological xenophobic self-preserving tradition such as Orientalism. But if we talked about Schacht
Schacht's thesis is not only refuted brutally by Muslims but by someOrientalists themselves. Like Crone, Motzki &ig Powers also refuted Schacht. Hallaq works on Schacht is phenomenal.
Orientalism is multifaceted & quite diverse in both its methodological approaches & positive
Orientalism is multifaceted & quite diverse in both its methodological approaches & positive
findings Motzki is an exception case, others like Crone, Cook etc did criticized Schacht but literally all of them followed them followed the same negative story and were adding more to it. Orientalism has always treated outside critiques by brushing
them aside as being inherently motivated by ideological considerations. In Hagarism Crone argued that Islam is actually later version of Christianity. Now Javad still considered them as authority.
First of all stop changing goalposting. The debate was about whether (1) Imam Ghazali is responsible for the decline (2) was there a decline after Ghazali? (3) Did Muslim rejected Ibn Sina's work and Was he influential or not. This was the actual debate and they were
proven wrong. Now stop changing goal-posting by bringing up takifirism. Yes he did takfir Ibn Sina and we did not deny this and neither this was the debate Imam Ghazali was even criticized by the Muslim Scholars and Ibn Sina was influential so your whole point makes no sense.
And yes extremism is a problem and not this but we have many domestic problems just any other part of world. The only difference between our kind of social problems and the West is that one religious and the is Secular.
While the west only consider religious violence as illegitimate. My not justifying religious violence the point is that there are two types of violence One is prevalent in the west ( bombing and invasions of Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Afg, Pak, libya etc) and the other is prevalent here
the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone violence is one of the foundational myths of liberal nation-state.
The religious extremism that started in the Subcontinent because of the lose of political sovereignty to the colonial powers. Now I'm just telling you how it was started I'm not crying about colonialism bcs I know you will come up "oh muslims invaded Europe" for which I can
again, quote scholars that say conquest and colonialism are different things. But I'd suggest these two books by Prof @SheraliTareen if anyone to understand the whole sectarianism in Subcontinent
. How It was started
. What were the causes
. How It was started
. What were the causes
And also it fascinate me they start labelling people like "mullah mentality" etc when they want to given themselves an excuse to not invest time in what the other person is saying or to listen to them.
There were Mullah's (Taqi Usmani, his father Muhammad Sharif and other scholars) invited Dr. Fazlur Rehman (modernist) for dinner and respected to him. So there is always sides of the story. Im not denying sectarianism but labelling every single Traditional Ulema with
mullah mentality is not fair.
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