Quotes from Professor Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge: Part 2

 "Rather, it is the imposition of Western knowledge and Western views of the world on others, under the pretense of acting in the interest of 'civilization,' that makes the difference between ordinary historical conquests and their Western counterparts." (159)

"Not just the colonists and state officials but also 'Europeans almost without exception' [58] 'went out to seek the Easterners, not to learn from them, as behooves youth in the presence of old men, but to strive, by brutal or insidious means, to convert them to their own way of thinking' [59] through exporting schools and a Western system of education and through 'assimilation'" [60] (160)

"Worse of all, however, is the Orientalists' pretension to understand Eastern traditions better than the Easterners themselves." (161)

"The subversive author, on the other hand, interrogates the foundational assumptions and epistemological mainstays of the discursive formations as well as the larger system of power that sustains them." (174)

"For Said himself, the 'ancient' was a strikingly oppositional category for the modern, that which is irrelevant, obsolete, defunct, not a continuous quality that has, through centuries and millennia, maintained a human and insentient ecology tested by time. The ancient for Guenon and Massignon is a long-standing tradition that undergoes piecemeal change, securely, steadily, and safely, but one that insists on maintaining itself within a principled order, ruled, as it were, by high-order governing ethical precepts. The 'ancient' for Guenon, Massignon, and even some more recent anthropologists is the embodiment of tradition, one that operates by a principled logic, and one that extends its life into the modern, partaking in it and coping with its pressures. [4]" (181)

"The invention of nuclear weapons or of sophisticated military technology that wiped off the face of the Earth millions of innocent victims in the colonies, in Japan, and in Europe itself is not a neutral act of science or the result of neutral technological competence." (204)

"the ecological and environmental crisis in endemic to the very modern system producing it, which is to say that the crisis itself is systemic, not contingent" (233)

"For Scheler, modern man lacks a unified and coherent idea of who and what he is, and even more so lacks a unified and coherent of what he is capable of becoming." (254)

"The fight within the self is squarely about inverting, if not subverting, the entire value structures of modernity, amounting to a revolution not only against how we think but, more importantly, against who we, as humans, ultimately are." (254)

"Whereas mainstream Muslim intellectuals have moved from skepticism, as a distinctly epistemological impasse, to the absolute necessity of theism, the paradigmatic line of modern thinking moved from theism to the unavoidability of skepticism. [67]" (262)

Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).