Who gave the Islamists the right to monopolize the battle of Orientalism?
By Zakaria Nimr – Sudan -
Translated from Arabic by the Editor. November 13/2026
The argument that only Islamists confronted the Orientalists raises a problem that goes beyond the difference of opinion about the reading of Arab intellectual history. It rests on the assumption that confronting Orientalism was the preserve of a political and religious current, and that the rest of the schools of thought either abandoned their identity in favor of the West or could not understand the nature of the civilizational conflict with it. This claim needs revision rather than repetition as historical fact.
The question the authors of this statement do not ask is: What do we mean by “confronting Orientalism”? Does it mean rejecting everything produced by the Western mind, studying its relationship to colonialism and power, or building independent knowledge that can read our history and societies free of prejudice? There is a great difference between these positions, and their conflation in a single discourse makes the debate closer to political mobilization than to intellectual research. Arab and Muslim intellectuals have been preoccupied with questions of renaissance, colonialism, dependency, and tyranny since the nineteenth century. Rifaa al-Tahtawi sought to understand the European experience and transfer its knowledge; Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi linked societies’ backwardness to tyranny; Taha Hussein fought for education and the liberation of the mind; and Malik ibn Nabi offered a civilized reading of colonialism and the problems societies face when exposed to it.
Later, Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, presented an epistemological critique of the relationship between the production of Western knowledge about the East and the institutions of power and control. His project was not affiliated with Islamist movements, and he did not need a political-religious reference to establish its importance. In fact, its influence extended to universities and critical schools around the World, and it became one of the main works in postcolonial studies. Where did the idea that resistance to cultural colonialism is legitimate only if it comes from an Islamic group come from? The problem is that some Islamic discourses treat intellectual history as an arena for scoring ideological victories. Rather than studying intellectuals’ contributions and approaches, they are categorized according to their attitudes toward religion, modernity, and the West. Those who do not adopt the Islamist movement conception become, in the eyes of some of these discourses, part of the project of Westernization, even if they are the owners of a serious critical project of colonialism and domination.
This kind of classification does not serve knowledge. Not everyone who studied Western philosophy is a follower of the West; not everyone who criticizes the heritage is anti-religious. Not everyone who raises the slogan of resistance to colonialism necessarily has a project for liberation. Slogans do not measure intellectual attitudes, but the ideas, curricula, and institutions they produce. Some Orientalist writings have been associated with colonial interests, contributing to stereotypes of the East and justifying control over it, while others have provided important linguistic and historical studies. This does not exempt the Western researcher from accountability, but it does force us to distinguish between scientific knowledge and its political use. This is one of the problems with the anti-Orientalist Islamic discourse, as some of its proponents tend to reduce the West to a unified hostile project, without distinguishing between European colonialism, Western philosophy, and critical schools that opposed imperialism and racism. How can colonialism be understood without reading Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, and Fanon? How can the relationship between knowledge and power be analyzed without looking at the schools of thought that produced these tools?
What is required is not to defend the West or exonerate its colonial history, but to refuse to deal with it through a comprehensive-categorization mentality. The West, which produced the institutions of colonialism, also produced intellectual and political currents that confronted colonialism and criticized capitalism and racism. Those who ignore this diversity cannot offer a serious critique of the Western experience. But the criticism should not stop with the Islamists. Some elites who raised the slogans of the Enlightenment treated Europe as a ready-made model for progress and did not make enough effort to understand the historical and social conditions that produced Western modernity. For some, modernity has become a cultural tradition, rather than a project to liberate the mind, build institutions, and expand freedoms. This is a real problem, but it does not give anyone the right to monopolize the Enlightenment or resist colonialism. Intellectual independence is not achieved by replacing a Western reference with a closed ideological reference, but by being able to criticize all references, including those to which we belong. I believe the most important question to ask of Islamic movements is: what have they presented after decades of discourse on resistance to Orientalism? What is its contribution to the development of scientific research? And what did you add to sociology, philosophy, and political science? How did you address freedom of thought and the right to disagree? What is its position on tyranny when it became part of the political practice of some of the forces to which it belongs? These questions cannot be reduced to accusing Islamists or denying the contributions of some of their intellectuals, for there are indeed serious Islamic writings critiquing colonialism and cultural domination. However, the existence of these writings does not mean the other currents were absent, nor does it prove that Islamists alone had the tools of confrontation. It is difficult to talk about the liberation of the mind when intellectuals do not have a safe space to disagree with the group, criticism of the political leadership is met with accusations, or religious ideas are used to justify power. These issues relate to the essence of freedom and cannot be overridden in the name of identity protection.
Arab and Muslim societies do not need a battle to prove that one political current was braver than others in the face of the Orientalists. They need to review their history, develop their universities, build independent research centers, and produce knowledge that explains their political, social, and economic crises. The problem is not the lack of anti-Western slogans, but the weakness of institutions capable of producing an independent epistemological alternative. I do not see the Enlightenment as opposed to religion, nor do I see criticism of the West as a betrayal of modernity. One can be critical of Western hegemony, at odds with political Islam, and at the same time believe in the right of societies to retain their cultural specificity. These are positions that are contradictory only in the mind of someone who wants to divide people into two camps with no third. I don’t think that Arab thought needs more of this kind of battle; it needs intellectuals who are not afraid to read the West, who do not treat heritage as a text outside of criticism, and who do not give any group the right to be the guardian of people’s minds. Anyone who wants to resist Orientalism must provide knowledge rather than demand a monopoly on the history of resistance. The intellectual battle does not belong to a group, nor is it measured by the number of slogans it raises, but by its ability to produce ideas that open the way for man to think freely, criticize authority, and reconsider everything that he believes to be a final truth.
