"Orientalists and the Event of Ghadir Khumm"

Orientalists and the Event of Ghadir Khumm by: Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi

Shi'ism and the Orientalists

When the Egyptian writer, Muhammad Qutb named his book Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, he was politely expressing the Muslim sentiment about the way the orientalists have treated Islam and Muslims in general. The word 'misunderstood' implies that at least a genuine attempt was made to understand Islam. However, a more blunt criticism of orientalism, shared by the majority of the Muslims, comes from Edward Said:

'The hardest thing to get most academic experts on Islam to admit is that what they say and do as scholars is set in a profoundly, and in some ways an offensively, political context. Everything about the study of Islam in the contemporary west is saturated with political importance, but hardly any writers on Islam, whether expert or general, admit the fact in what they say. Objectivity is assumed to be inherent in learned discourse about other societies, despite the long history of political, moral and religious concern felt in all societies, western or Islamic, about the alien, the strange and the different. In Europe, for example, the orientalists have traditionally been affiliated directly with colonial offices.
 

Click here to read the Book