Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: deleted by user — February 2, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

If it's been happening for decades I am unaware of it. Please send some literature you think has reframed the critique of orientalism in duch a fashion.

If you know of some literature evaluating the assumption stack of modern Western academic historiography please send it my way. Specifically something critiquing the rather idiosyncratic combination of:

Epicurean atomism

Naturalism

Empiricism

Secularism

Post-Hegelianism

The materialist theory of religion

And methodological atheism

*Modernism (specifically Whig historiography, and the failure of Western academia to consider modern advances in decision theory)

As applied specifically to the study of history.

The closest thing I've found is Restating Orientalism by Wael Hallaq but he takes a different approach entirely, by expanding the original arguments of Edward Said and applying them to other fields/disciplines (law, philosophy, science, etc.).

What I am suggesting is a movement in the opposite direction. If we are totally uncritical about the tools we are using to be critical about something like hadith sciences, what kind of confidence does that really inspire about our criticism? And why have confidence in tools we don't evaluate or even acknowledge are there?

I would propose that we don't look at orientalism through the lens of marrying colonial power & a chauvanistic study of Islam. What we should consider as "orientalism" should be utilizing tools that are not critically evaluated to then perform a critical evaluation of other tools.