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Louis Massignon was a 20th-century French Orientalist and scholar of Islam. Although he was a devout Catholic and although he was trained long after Orientalist discourse had ossified its representation of Oriental subjects (and more specifically, Arab or Muslim subjects) into a racist caricature, Massignon was in general more sympathetic in his portrayals of Islam and Muslim people than his contemporaries. However, in Orientalism, Said uses Massignon’s legacy to dissect the ways in which contemporary Orientalists continue to construct personal visions of the Orient based on received ideas, stereotypes, and their own cultural contexts rather than through a more neutral exploration of the regions, cultures, and people under consideration. Thus, Massignon’s sympathy for Islam leads him to rewrite and reinterpret the faith and its history through the lens of his own Catholic religiosity.
Louis Massignon Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Louis Massignon or refer to Louis Massignon. 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 3
Quotes
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.
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Explanation and Analysis:
[The] real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso [thereby] implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth,” which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representation (or misrepresentations—the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse.
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Louis Massignon Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Louis Massignon or refer to Louis Massignon. 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 3
Quotes
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
[The] real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso [thereby] implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth,” which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representation (or misrepresentations—the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse.
