Shi'ism and the Orientalists When the Egyptian writer...

Shi'ism and the Orientalists When the Egyptian writer, Muhammad Qutb named his book Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, he was politely expressing the Muslim sentiment about the way the orientalists have treated Islam and Muslims in general. The word 'misunderstood' implies that at least a genuine attempt was made to understand Islam.

However, a more blunt criticism of orientalism, shared by the majority of the Muslims, comes from Edward said: ‘’The hardest thing to get most academic experts on Islam to admit is that what they say and do as scholars, is set in a profoundly and in some ways an offensively, political context.’’ Everything about the study of Islam in the contemporary West is saturated with political importance, but hardly any writers on Islam, whether expert or general, admit the fact in what they say.

Objectivity is assumed to be inherent in learned discourse about other societies, despite the long history of political, moral and religious concern felt in all societies, western or Islamic, about the alien, the strange and the different.

In Europe, for example, the orientalists have traditionally been affiliated directly with colonial offices.'[^1] Instead of assuming that objectivity is inherent in learned discourses, the western scholarship has to realize that pre-commitment to a political or religious tradition, on a conscious or subconscious level, can lead to biased judgement.

As Marshall Hudgson writes: ‘’Bias comes especially in the questions he poses and in the type of category he uses, where indeed, bias is especially hard to track down because it is hard to suspect the very terms one uses, which seem so innocently neutral...’’[^2] The Muslim reaction to the image portrayed of them by the western scholarship is beginning to get its due attention.

In 1979 the highly respected orientalist Albert Hourani said: ‘’The voices of those from the Middle East and North Africa telling us that they do not recognize themselves in the image we have formed of them are too numerous and insistent to be explained in terms of academic rivalry or national pride.’’[^3]36 This was about Islam and Muslims vis-a-vis the orientalists.

However, when we focus on the study of Shi'ism by the orientalists, the word 'misunderstood' is not strong enough, rather it is an understatement. Not only is Shi'ism misunderstood, it has been ignored, misrepresented and studied mostly through the heresiographic literature of its opponents.