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Charles Malik and the Origins of a Christian Critique of Orientalism in Lebanon and Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The field of Oriental studies was the main context in which amateur and professional scholars developed the academic study of Islam before World War II. The role of religion in the rise of this discipline is now widely acknowledged, but the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in the critique and transformation of Orientalism after World War II has never been explored. Given the prevalence of Christian scholars in Islamic studies after 1945, why has this been the case?
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References
1 Historically, the term ‘Orientalism’ has referred variously to a scholarly discipline, an imperial educational policy, a tradition of art and architecture and a discourse of imperial power: see MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: History, Tlieory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), xii–xiii.Google Scholar In this essay, I use it, like Malik, to refer to a scholarly discipline. While geographical terms like ‘the West’ appear in quotation marks in this essay only when they reflect the exact language of the cited material, the reader should note that I consider such designations to be historical constructs rather than natural entities.
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79 Ibid. ii.
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82 Ibid. 23–4.
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85 Ibid.
86 Ibid. 175.
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