1st Edition
The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism Reversing the Gaze
Edward Said’s Orientalism, now more than fifty years old, has to be one of the most frequently cited books among academics in a wide range of disciplines, and the most frequently assigned book to undergraduates at colleges.
Among the common questions raised in response to Said’s book: Did scholars in Western Europe provide crucial support to the imperialist, colonialist activities of European regimes? Are their writings on Islam laden with denigrating, eroticized, distorting biases that have left an indelible impact on Western society? What is the "Orientalism" invented by Europe and what is its impact today?
However, one question has been less raised (or less has been done about the question): How were the Orientalist writings of European scholars of Islam received among their Muslim contemporaries? An international team of contributors rectify this oversight in this volume.
List of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Susannah Heschel and Umar Ryad: Introduction 1. Tarek el-Ariss, On Cooks and Crooks: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and the Orientalists in England and France (1840s-1850s) 2. Kathryn Anne Schwartz, Experiencing Orientalism: Amin al-Madani and the Sixth Oriental Congress, Leiden, 1883 3. Said F. Hassen and Abdallah Omran, The Reception of the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam: An Egyptian Debate on the Credibility of Orientalism 4. Katalin Rac, Arabic Literature for the Colonizer and the Colonized: Ignaz Goldziher and Hungary’s Eastern Politics 1878-1918 5. Roy Bar-Sadeh, Islamic Modernism between Colonialism and Orientalism: Al-Manar's Intellectual Circles and Aligarh's Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, 1898-1914. 6. Aaron Glasserman, The Frustrating Authority of Mr. Wells: Islam and the Politics of Orientalism in Republican China 7. Susannah Heschel, Orientalist Triangulations: Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Response to Christian Europe 8. Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, "Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes": The German-Jewish Orientalist Josef Horovitz in Germany, India, and Palestine 9. Mostafa Hussein, Scholarship on Islamic Archaeology Between Zionism and Arab Nationalist Movements 10. Mehdi Sajid, A Muslim Convert to Christianity as an Orientalist in Europe – The Case of the Moroccan Franciscan Jean-Mohammed Abdeljalil Bibliography Index
Biography
Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. She has held research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Umar Ryad is a Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Leuven and member of the Young Academy of Belgium. Previously, he has worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden (2008–2014) and as an Associate Professor at Utrecht University (2014–2017). He is currently leading a European Research Council (ERC) project which focuses on the "History of Muslims in Interwar Europe." His current research also includes the dynamics of the networks of pan-Islamist movements, Muslim polemics on Christianity, and transnational Islam in the modern world.
