"Having argued for the importance of paying attention to the politics of knowledge in this field,

I hasten to add that we need to be very careful not to conflate a particular theoretical or interpretive approach with, or to explain it solely or even mainly in terms of, bias, prejudice, stereotyping or racism. As we will see, for many centuries - indeed, down to the present day - a good many people in the West, including the ostensibly learned, have embraced and espoused crude prejudices about Islam, Muslims, Arabs and others. However, for purposes of analysis at least, we need to distinguish clearly between such sentiments, however repellent or pernicious, on the one hand, and on the other the interpretive framework embraced by an individual scholar or by a group of scholars in a given field. As we will see, there have been a substantial number of scholars who were highly respectful of Islam and empathetic toward its adherents' beliefs and aspirations but who nonetheless produced work which critics have argued is implicitly or explicitly informed by a questionable interpretive framework. So while I will certainly be noting instances of prejudice, stereotyping and racism in scholarship on Islam and the Middle East, I will also be insisting that it is important to distinguish such attitudes from the interpretive frameworks which scholars use; these are, analytically at least, two different things, though they all too often coincide and can be hard to separate."

-Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, p. 3-4