Orientalists

[Ibn Kutub]

Bu yerga taniqli orientalistlar - sharqiy davlatlar, asosan islom va musulmon olami ustida ilmiy izlanishlar olib borgan olimlar haqida ma'lumotlar qo'yib boriladi.

[Ibn Kutub]

Louis Massignon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Massignon)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louis Massignon (July 25, 1883–October 31, 1962) was a French scholar of Islam and its history. Although a Catholic himself, he tried to understand Islam from within and thus had a great influence on the way Islam was seen in the West; among other things, he paved the way for a greater openness inside the Catholic Church towards Islam as it was documented in the pastoral Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate.
***
Massignon was sometimes criticized by Muslims for giving too much importance to Muslim figures that are considered somewhat marginal by Islamic mainstream, such as al-Hallaj and for paying too much attention to Sufism, and too little to Islamic legalism. (Gude, 116)

Edward Said, a non-Muslim Arab-American scholar, wrote Massignon used Hallaj to "embody, to incarnate, values essentially outlawed by the mains doctrinal system of Islam, a system that Massignon himself described mainly in order to circumvent it with al-Hallaj". (Orientalism, p. 272)

In his thesis L'Islam dans le Miroir de l'Occident (1963), his Dutch student J.J. Waardenburg gave the following synthesis of Massignon's precepts: "1°- God is free to reveal Himself when and how He wants. 2°- The action of God is exercised in the world of grace that may also be outside Christianity; it can be found in Islam, in the mystical vocations. 3°- The religious discovery has an existential character, the religious object has a significance for the seeker. 4°- Religious science is a religious study in the proper sense of the word: it is a discovery of grace (i.e. the work of the Saint-Esprit, Rûh Allah, Holy Ghost)." (Also see Sufi studies.)

A "Catholic, scholar, Islamist, and mystic" is how Seyyed Hossein Nasr describes him in his homage at the 1983 commemoration of the 100th birthday of Louis Massignon.

Catholic: He played a key role in the acceptance by religious authority of the Rule for the Little Brothers of Jesus as dictated by Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916).

Scholar: At the age of 29 (1912-1913) he delivered a series of 40 lectures in Arabic on the history of philosophy at the Egyptian University of Cairo; from 1922 till 1954 he was entitled the Chair of Muslim Sociology created in 1902 by Alfred Le Chatelier at the Collège de France with support of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

Islamicist: He pioneered the studies of early Sufism in the west in two major contributions; 1°- Essay sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane (Guenther ed., Paris 1922). 2°- La Passion d'al Hallâj (Guenther ed., Paris 1922: translated by his student Herbert Mason as The Passion of al-Hallâj, Princeton University Press, 1982).

Mystic: He truly lived the deep spirituality of his faith in the inter-religious dialogue between Christianity and Islam; in a state described by Seyyed Hossein Nasr as manifesting "al-barakat al-isawiyyah" (in Présence de Louis Massignon, Paris, 1987).

[Sigma]

You better give some description to this Orientalist topic so that people know what their subject/aim/deeds/misdeeds was and is. And better to start with kind of a tree, ie first ever scholar to coin a phrase/to study the Orient, founder, follower, refuter, doubter and etc. That way is more helpful, I suppose.

[Ibn Kutub]

You better give some description to this Orientalist topic so that people know what their subject/aim/deeds/misdeeds was and is. And better to start with kind of a tree, ie first ever scholar to coin a phrase/to study the Orient, founder, follower, refuter, doubter and etc. That way is more helpful, I suppose.

As I am not specialist on the topic, I am afraid that I can't develop the tree, sorry :( If I opened this thread, it is that may be there are users, like you for example, who know useful things or can give reference to serious scholars so that I can discover new authors.
For myself, orientalists are mainly those western writers who studied Eastern cultures. Among them, majority of them dedicated their works to the study of Islam and muslim societies. Because the most of the parts of western colonies were muslim societies.
Among them there are really interesting authors who contributed much, non regarding their views or aims, to the systematization of knowledge on islam and muslim societies.
Here follows an excerpt from wiki article on Edward Said who changed the field:
Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[14] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

“ So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.[15]

[Ibn Kutub]

Edward Said (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said)
Edward Wadie Said (Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, translit: Edward Wādi Sa‘id) (1 November 1935, Jerusalem - 25 September 2003, New York City) was a well-known Palestinian-American literary theorist and outspoken Palestinian activist. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory

Edward Said is best know for his work "Orientalism" and its influence on the field.

Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[14] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

“ So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.[15] ”


The argument

Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Oriental Studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the former[16]), and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi[17], Anouar Malek-Abdel[18], Maxime Rodinson[19], and Richard William Southern[20], Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term which he transformed into a pejorative):

“ I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact – and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. (Said, Orientalism 11) ”

Said contended that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias which even most Western scholars could not recognise. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective which takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.

Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East which can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

[Ibn Kutub]

Maxime Rodinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxime_Rodinson)
Maxime Rodinson (26 January 1915–23 May 2004) was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. The son of a Russian-Polish Jewish clothing trader who died in Auschwitz with his wife, Rodinson studied oriental languages, and became professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) at EPHE (Йcole Pratique des Hautes Йtudes, France).

He joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons." He then turned away after the Stalinist drift of the party, from which he was excluded in 1958. He is the author of a rich body of work, including his well-known "Muhammad," a biography of the prophet of Islam.

Rodinson became well-known in France when he expressed a certain reticence about Israel, despite his own Jewish ancestry. He particularly criticized the settlement policies of the Jewish state. At the same time, some credit him with coining the term "Islamic fascism" (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian revolution.

Family
The parents of Maxime Rodinson were Russian-polish immigrants, who became members of the Communist Party. They arrived in France at the end of the 19th century as refugees from anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire. His father was a clothing trader, who set up a business making waterproof clothing in the Yiddish-speaking part of Paris, called the Pletzl, in the district of the Marais. They became port-of-call for the other Russian exiles, most of them revolutionaries hostile to the Tsarist regime. His father tried to unionise and organize educational and other services for the working-class Jewish community. In 1892, he helped to establish a Jewish working-class library, containing hundreds of works in Yiddish, Russian and French.

In 1920, the Rodinsons joined the Communist Party and as soon as France recognised Soviet Russia, in 1924, they applied for Soviet citizenship. Rodinson grew up in a fervently Stalinist "de-Judaized" and "anti-Zionist" family. Neither he nor his sister learned Yiddish. The family was poor so that Rodinson became an errand boy at the age of 13 after obtaining a primary school certificate. But he thrived and learned by borrowing books, obliging teachers, who didn't demand payment, and began to learn oriental languages at first on Saturday afternoons and in the evenings.

In 1932, he gained entry to the Ecole des Langues Orientales to prepare for a career as a diplomat-interpreter, thanks to the possibility for persons without academic qualifications to take the competitive entrance examination. He learned Arabic. Later he prepared a thesis in comparative Semitics, and learned Hebrew, which surprised his family. In 1937, he entered the National Council of Research, became a full-student of Islam and joined the same year the Communist Party.

During the Second World War, he was appointed to the French Institute of Damascus in 1940, where he extended his knowledge of Islam and escaped the persecution of Jews in occupied France. His parents perished in Auschwitz in 1943. He spent seven years in Lebanon (in Sidon and Beirut).


A professor of Oriental Languages and a Marxist without partyIn 1948, he became a librarian at the Bibliothиque Nationale in Paris, where he was put in charge with the Muslim section. In 1955, he was appointed director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, becoming a professor of classical Ethiopian four years later. He left the Communist Party but remained a Marxist in the same period (1958), accused of doing so to further his career. But his decision was based on his agnosticism, and he explained that being a party member was like following a religion and he wanted to renounce

"the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes."
He became well-known in the 1960s when he published "Muhammad" in 1961, a biography of the Prophet's life written in a sociological point of view, biography which is still banned in parts of the Arab world. Five years later, he published "Islam and Capitalism", a study of the economic decline of Muslims society. He was accused of being anti-Zionist for his stance in favor of Palestinian self-determination, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He was awarded the 1995 Prize by the Rationalist Organisation.



Studying Islam in a sociological point of viewRodinson's work combined Sociological and Marxist theories, Marxism which helped him:

"opening my eyes and making me understand and say that the world of Islam was subject to the same laws and tendencies as the rest of the human race."

Hence, his first book was a study of Muhammad ("Muhammad", 1960), setting the Prophet in his social context and "probably in an unconscious fashion, [he] compared him to Stalin." This attempt, despite some mistakes, was a rationalist study which tried to explain the economical and social origins of Islam. In his further work was "Islam and Capitalism" (1966), title echoing to Max Weber's famous thesis regarding the development of Capitalism in Europe and the rise of Protestantism. He tried to go beyond two prejudices: the first one widespread in Europe that Islam is a brake for the development of Capitalism and the second one widespread among Muslims that Islam was egalitarian. He emphasized social elements, seing Islam as a neutral factor. Throughout all his later works on Islam, he will stress out the relation between the doctrines inspired by Muhammad and economical and social structures in the Muslim world.


Works by Maxime Rodinson

The Arabs (1981) ISBN 0-226-72356-9 — original French publication: 1979
Marxism and the Muslim world (1982) ISBN 0-85345-586-4, original French publication: 1972
Israel and the Arabs (1982) ISBN 0-14-022445-9
Marxist-Leninist Scientific Atheism and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR (Religion and Reason) with James Thrower (1983) ISBN 90-279-3060-0
Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (1984) ISBN 0-685-08870-7
Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1988) ISBN 0-913460-22-2
Europe and the Mystique of Islam (2002) ISBN 1-85043-106-X, translation of 'La Fascination de l’Islam,' 1980
Muhammad (2002) ISBN 1-56584-752-0, original French publication: 1960

[Ibn Kutub]

John Esposito (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Esposito)



John Louis Esposito (born 19 May 1940, Brooklyn, New York City) is a professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

Early life
Esposito was raised a Catholic in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City, and spent a decade in a Catholic monastery. After taking his first degree he worked as a management consultant and high-school teacher. He then studied for a masters in theology at St Johns University. He earned a PhD at Temple University, Pennsylvania in 1974, studying Islam for the first time.


Academic career
For nearly twenty years after completing his PhD, Esposito had taught religious studies (including Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam) at the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Massachusetts. He published Islam and Politics in 1984, and Islam: The Straight Path in 1988; both books sold well, going through many editions. In 1988, he was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy from 1999 to 2004.[1] He is editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, and Oxford’s The Islamic World: Past and Present. He is the founding director of Georgetown’s Prince Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and has served as president of MESA and of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies.

The center at Georgetown University directed by Dr Esposito is the recipient of a $20,000,000 endowment from Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue.[2]

*********
Here is the link (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Esposito/esposito-con0.html) to an interview with John Esposito in the Conversations with History website
This is an excerpt from that interview
Conclusion
We began this discussion talking about your discovery of the third faith, Islam, alongside Christianity and Judaism. I'm curious, as somebody who's thought a lot about religion, is it fair to say that in some ways fundamentalism, extreme fundamentalism in all three religions, is a major problem of modernity these days that is across the board?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We forget in recent decades there's been a religious resurgence, and it's mainstream in most faiths, but you have this fundamentalism. I like to put it as follows: Those people we call fundamentalists are generally people who subscribe to a rather exclusivist theology. They see themselves as right, and, therefore, "If I'm right, you're wrong. We're the forces of good; [you're the] forces of evil. Forces of God; forces of Satan." And that exclusivist theology tends to be weak on pluralism and on religious tolerance. That doesn't mean they're going to kill other people. They just know other people are wrong. Often for many of them, they know that when you die, you're going to go to hell. Doesn't mean I feel I have to dispatch you to hell. You see?

The extremist is the one who takes this exclusivist theology, this polarized world view, harnesses it into a "should" and says, "No. If we have the truth, and you represent untruth, we're the army of God, and you're the army of Satan, then we have an obligation to pursue." That struggle is not just a struggle of words and of missionaries, etc., it becomes an armed struggle. And, of course, they dovetail it with political, social, and economic grievances. And that's what you see.

So, for example, the assassin of Mr. Rabin would pore over religious texts to find a way to legitimate his grievance.

And he was Jewish, actually.

He was Jewish.

Your institute is addressing some of these problems on the domestic side, looking at the promotion of a Christian - Islamic dialogue. Tell us a little about that agenda and what it is attempting to achieve, and the possibilities there.

Our center was created in 1993, within the Walsh School of Foreign Service. The full title of the center is the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding: History, and International Affairs. So although we do some of it, we're not primarily interested in theological dialogue.

I see.

We address the whole issue of the relationship, therefore, in history of international affairs past and present. We run programs domestically and internationally. We run them in the United States, we run them in Europe, we run them all over the Muslim world. We speak and write about contemporary issues. We write briefing papers. We write books that deal with the role of Islam in Muslim politics, with regard to gender issues. We work with think tanks, we work with religious groups, universities, and even governments running workshops and conferences all over the world. And we do an awful lot with the media, domestically and internationally. For many of us, our writings are translated not only into European languages, or Chinese and Japanese, but into Muslim languages. We attempt an engagement not only in Washington and across America, but in fact, we attempt this kind of engagement internationally.

So what you're really talking about is elevating the consciousness in the same way that your consciousness was elevated as you began your pursuit of scholarly studies?

Precisely. Our whole idea is to open up that window, to say to people, "Yes, you know something, but often it's that something that's coming through what I call the 'explosive headline' events." Because the media is about grabbing your attention and selling newspapers, it's not about what the average person is doing, or where the average person is coming from. And trying to, for example, say to people, "Anti-Americanism is broad-based in the Muslim world. But it's also broad-based outside. Anti-Americanism in Europe and in the Muslim world does not mean hatred of America. However, that anti-Americanism does, in the hands of extremists, become a hatred of America that, in fact, advocates violence." We make those kinds of distinctions.

In a way, we're doing what post-9/11, the Bush administration tried to do in some of its public diplomacy. Regrettably, it didn't address sufficiently the foreign policy issues. But when it said, "We want to explain to people, because we believe that people out there really don't understand the whole picture. They don't really know what America is about." Well, we're trying to broaden that picture on all sides to the extent that we can.

One final question requiring a short answer. How would you advise students to prepare for a future where international politics is going to be important, the Islamic world is going to be important, and we have to deal with the challenges posed by America's enormous power in the world?

I think students are positioned today in a way that they weren't before. Post-9/11 has meant, whether it's the curriculum or our media, a far more visible set of opportunities to learn more. And students ought to be more motivated. America was attacked, and it is part of their future. This isn't a war that's being fought "over there." So, I say to students: "You have an obligation as a citizen, let alone the opportunity as a student, to explore international affairs and to attempt to make your contribution."

Well, on that note, we're very pleased to have had you here today, and thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

Thank you. It was fun.

[Пушкарева]

Nezabudka - shaqshunoslik graduate :P JK * urishmela, kettim.

* - for Ibn Kitob

Bu yerga taniqli orientalistlar - sharqiy davlatlar, asosan islom va musulmon olami ustida ilmiy izlanishlar olib borgan olimlar haqida ma'lumotlar qo'yib boriladi.