Hatred of Inferiority and Confrontation with the West

Abstract This chapter focuses particularly on the influence on Muslim approaches to the West and Westerners and the study of the Qurʾān in the Muslim academy of Edward W. Said’s important work on cultural representation, Orientalism. It looks at how Said did not, in the nature of things, accurately depict the West and Westerners and how, in respect to the study of Islam, Muslims have tended to substitute Western scientists and literary figures for Western scholars of Islam. Finally, chapter 4 seeks to explain how a Muslim “inferiority complex,” as (tacitly) played out in Orientalism, has over the years been absorbed into the religious teaching of Islam and given rise to much of the substance to the defensive quality of the “Islamic Apologetics” that the Muslim academy has opposed to historical critical Islamic studies.