Inherited Prejudices

Orientalism and Orientalists, regarded by some as a pejorative name, have earned a negative reputation in the annals of Western Islamic scholarship. It was perhaps mainly because of this that the 30th International Congress of Orientalists held in 1973 felt it necessary to change its name to the International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa. Notwithstanding the metamorphosis of the nomenclature, the Orientalists’ frontal, and at times vicious, attack on the authenticity of the Qur’an, the life and examples of the Prophet (sirah and sunnah), with few exceptions, continued unabated. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many orientalists in the past were not willing to accept the Qur’an as the word of God and insisted that it was the handiwork of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) who did not hesitate to plagiarise materials from Jewish and Christian sources and even justified his ‘evil designs’ by inventing verses in the Qur’an. Apart from tracing the JudaeoChristian antecedents of the Qur’an, a few so-called Qur’an specialists devoted their lives to textual and linguistic studies while others laboured to produce a ‘critical text’ of the Qur’an along with the chronological rearrangement of the surahs and verses.