The West Misreads Islam Through Its Own Categories
Orientalism is not an aberration in Western intellectual history it is a logical product of a worldview that strips the world of spiritual essence and reduces everything, including human beings, to objects of study.
"Why did Europe birth Orientalism and equate difference with weakness? The premodern Chinese dynasties, for instance, equated cultural difference with barbarity or lack of refinement. But they did not see this as a justification for developing an army of scholars or for staffing whole departments in their educational institutions for the sole purpose of studying the Barbarians." Wael Hallaq
Wael Hallaq's critique of Edward Said is not that Said was wrong about Orientalism's distortions, but that he only diagnosed a symptom. Said showed how Western literature misrepresented the East through demeaning or exoticizing lenses. Hallaq goes deeper: the very capacity to turn human cultures into objects of dispassionate, value-stripped analysis is a product of the Enlightenment's displacement of God from the center of knowledge. When you remove the sacred from the world, everything becomes available for instrumentalized study.
The Islamic knowledge system was fundamentally different. A Muslim scholar studying another civilization did so within a framework that recognized every created thing as engaged in glorification of its Creator. The scientific enterprise in Islamic civilization did not strip the world of spiritual essence. Modern science does. That distinction what Hallaq calls the "is/ought" separation is not a minor philosophical quibble. It is the metaphysical foundation that made Orientalism, and later colonialism's intellectual apparatus, possible.
Said's error was using the master's tools to critique the master's house. Critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and secular humanism all operate within the same central domain they claim to resist. They identify victim and perpetrator but offer no path out, because the tools themselves presuppose the very worldview that generated the problem.
Takeaway: You cannot dismantle a system of thought using the very assumptions that produced it genuine critique requires an alternative metaphysical foundation.
See also: Orientalism Is a Symptom Not the Disease | Modernity Replaced God With the Human Subject | The Crisis of Islamic Civilization Is a Crisis of Modernity