on Orientalist book collecting

Instead of repeating earlier notions of Eastern wisdom to be discovered and learned from, Sprenger [(1813-93)] announces an alternative project: although the works he has collected have no useful substance whatsoever, they allow the reconstruction of a civilization that for him is clearly inferior to that of Europe but that can be studied on a larger historical scale than is possible in the European case. His analogy to the dissection of animals is revealing and suggests a particular explanation for the uneasiness of Muslim scholars who encountered Orientalist book collecting. Although this activity aimed at a comprehensive reconstruction of the Islamic intellectual heritage, it did not perceive its object as a living and breathing intellectual tradition. Rather, the collectors sought Oriental books as the raw material for the construction of a taxidermic replica, a stuffed corpse of the Islamic cultural edifice to be placed in the mental museum of European thought.

Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 16.