Tom Facchine – What Is Orientalism-@AbdullahShanqiti

			If someone asks the question, what is Orientalism? I hear this term kind of popping around was it
mean? I remember the statement of our shape and Medina Sheikh Abdullah Shan PD, he would say whom
you had rasuna. When asked no laminate rose, he would say they study us. And as for us, we don't
study. So it refers to the process and the institutions of other people, non Muslims producing
knowledge about us. We're an object of study, we're an object of study for other people, and they
produce knowledge about us that's not based on our beliefs that's not based on submission to Allah
subhanaw taala. That's not based on believing that the Quran is divine guidance, not based on
		

			believing that the Hadith, or the authentic statements of the Prophet alayhi salatu salam, and
they're producing knowledge about Islam and knowledge about the Muslims, there's conferences,
there's papers, there's journals, there's institutions, there's universities, their speaker
circuits, there's conferences and conventions and all this sort of thing. Why? Why does it exist? Is
it just that people are curious? No, it's that historically, producing knowledge about Islam and
producing knowledge about Muslims was essential to the project of conquering Muslims and changing
Islam, they had to know about us, in order to conquer us, they had to know about Islam in order to
		

			try to trick us and convince us that some of the things they wanted to do to us were right, and
okay. And part of our tradition, like we mentioned before, about the look system, when they had
oriental scholars producing information in French Algeria, that, that the web system was better was
an innovation. This is the playbook. And now Now, the names have changed. You know, it's not the
Oriental School of this or, you know, you know, the Department of Oriental Studies, they've changed
the name. Now, it's, you know, Near Eastern Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Islamic studies, but
this is the, the legacy. And this is the heritage of these departments. And these disciplines, it
		

			goes back to and it's not separable from the colonial project. And it starts with the kind of
epistemic foundations of wanting to know in order to conquer in order to subject so when we're
talking about Orientalism, that's what we're talking about. This is why it's essential that we have
a conversation amongst ourselves. This is why it's essential that we have academic discussions
amongst ourselves. This is why there's a big, big, big difference between somebody who studies Islam
in an authentic way, in a traditional way, a big difference between that and somebody who studies it
in a department of Islamic Studies, not that it's impossible, a lot of these departments have
		

			changed, some of them have changed more than others. From university to university, there's
different individuals, some people are doing very good work, but the overall foundations of these
sorts of departments and universities, and many of the scholars who operate within them are
operating with assumptions that are not only outside of our faith, but actually undermine our faith
to say that if one wants to go and educate themselves, or participate in such a program, or benefit
from the works, I mean, I read books from people who are in these sorts of departments and things
like that, but you have to be aware, you have to be awake, you can't take everything at face value,
		

			you have to take it with a grain of salt, and you need to understand sort of the ideologies and the
projects that are that are at play. So it should be an understanding. And this is what back to
Sheikh Abdullah statement. This is what he was trying to get us to see and to motivate us. So what
are we doing right? Look at how hard these people are working to undermine us and what are we doing?
What are we study, we need to study our own tradition. We need to study our own scholars, we need to
develop and enhance and make more sophisticated this conversation that's going on in our realm in
our own minds and reach the point where we don't have to feel like we rely on this sort of
		

			scholarship which is tainted or feel that that sort of scholarship has any sort of superiority just
because it comes from the big name universities and they've got the libraries and they've got all
the artifacts that they stole from us.