Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context by Ottfried Fraisse

Author:Ottfried Fraisse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

I can now conclude. Leo Strauss had no orientalist bias or agenda. The Islamic philosophers he studied were for him in no way inferior. He uncovered and pointed to their profound intelligence and insight. He read their books—some at the time little known—with the same care and passion he reserved for the study of the most respected Western philosophers—ancients and moderns—and he taught and guided generations of students to do the same. I suppose there is some watered-down sense of Orientalism one could apply to Strauss if one were determined to do so, that is, if one were prepared to strip the term of connotations of political bias or racist prejudice, of the desire or need to justify certain Western interests in the imperial and/or intellectual domination of the backward and inferior Arab peoples of the East (as biased orientalists viewed them), and of the self or national empowerment that one feels from looking down in contempt at the inferior other. However, this is not at all Said’s Orientalism, is of very little interest, and becomes simply a forced label employed to try to attack someone with whom one disagrees. One could say that Strauss engaged in Orientalism insofar as he assumed that one can study the great Islamic philosophers with the same research tools and methods with which one studies most other great philosophers, and in his attempt to discern, inter alia, how they read Plato and Aristotle via Arabic translations, to what extent they adopted and adapted their teachings, and to assess their place in the history of philosophy.627 In this sense, the very periodization of these falāsifa as “medieval” could be seen as a mistaken Western imposition, as could the orientalist assumption that a non-Muslim or non-Arab could possibly understand the intentions and thinking of these philosophers. But one could also be charged with Orientalism, with even greater justification, for maintaining the opposite position, that is, that because of the inferior otherness of the Arab peoples and the “aversion of the Muslims from the thought processes of rationalism,” it makes no sense to try to read their great thinkers as one would, for example, the great rationalist Greek philosophers.628 In other words, if we define the term “orientalism” loosely and toss it around for our own purposes, the term loses its significance, and virtually any scholar can be maligned for his Orientalism. I have tried to show that Strauss had no orientalist assumptions and prejudices in any meaningful sense of the word. This does not mean that one has to agree with his arguments and conclusions, but one would be amiss to question the nobility of his motives or slight his contribution to the history of Islamic philosophy.

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