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Louis Massignon
Gustave Grunebaum was a 20th-century Austrian Orientalist who moved to the United States in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. His positions at the University of Chicago and UCLA gave him clout in post-war American Oriental Studies. Trained in Arabic languages and literatures, Grunebaum nevertheless spent much of his career focused on the topic of Islam as a religious and cultural force. He depicted Islam in polemical terms as a backward, ignorant, violent, and antithetical to Western culture and social progress. These depictions, many of which were published in the 1940s and 1950s coincided with increasing American investment in the Near East and its involvement in the creation of the state of Israel in that period. Thus, for Said, Grunebaum represents the way that the discourse of Orientalism was both increasingly brought to bear on specifically Arab and Muslim subjects, and the way that academic Orientalism had become more or less a tool of political power by the second half of the 20th century.
Gustave Grunebaum Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Gustave Grunebaum or refer to Gustave Grunebaum. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 4
Quotes
Von Grunebaum’s Islam, after all, is the Islam of the earlier European Orientalists—monolithic, scornful of ordinary human experience, gross, reductive, unchanging.
At bottom such a view of Islam is political, not even euphemistically impartial. The strength of its hold on the new Orientalist (younger, that is, than Von Grunebaum) is due in part to its traditional authority and in part to its use-value as a handle for grasping a vast region of the world and proclaiming it an entirely coherent phenomenon. Since Islam has never easily been encompassed by the West politically—and certainly since World War II Arab nationalism has been a movement openly declaring its hostility to Western imperialism—the desire to assert intellectually satisfying things about Islam in retaliation increases.
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Gustave Grunebaum Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Gustave Grunebaum or refer to Gustave Grunebaum. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 4
Quotes
Von Grunebaum’s Islam, after all, is the Islam of the earlier European Orientalists—monolithic, scornful of ordinary human experience, gross, reductive, unchanging.
At bottom such a view of Islam is political, not even euphemistically impartial. The strength of its hold on the new Orientalist (younger, that is, than Von Grunebaum) is due in part to its traditional authority and in part to its use-value as a handle for grasping a vast region of the world and proclaiming it an entirely coherent phenomenon. Since Islam has never easily been encompassed by the West politically—and certainly since World War II Arab nationalism has been a movement openly declaring its hostility to Western imperialism—the desire to assert intellectually satisfying things about Islam in retaliation increases.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
