Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed at scholarship and scholars. In Said’s opinion, everybody who had ever studied or written about the Middle East had done so in bad faith. Epigraphists, archaeologists, grammarians and linguists, papyrologists, geographers, the lot, including poets and travellers, had nothing to do with the advancement of learning or the recording of their findings and impressions. With sinister purpose, they were imposing themselves upon innocent and harmless people. Century after century, the activity of these assorted men was not at all what it might seem but only ‘a rationalisation of colonial rule’ and, since for most of the time there was no colonial rule, a justification of it ‘in advance’.

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