orientalist

There's a couple other authors I want to get into relating to the...

Orientalist academic culture in the Kaiser Reich and then later in the Third Reich and the impact that had on conceptual... matters but i i want to get into the the grand mufti al-husseini and and palestine and its status as an axis um element and things and then i promise after that we'll get back to the 30 years war but this is important and it's it's particularly timely in my

opinion okay do you think um you're going to be able to talk about the grand mufti and van leers in one episode or is this possibly going to be three

Yeah, it might go three, but I'll see what I can do.

A lot of people who otherwise know the subject matter are overly dismissive of that.

Interestingly, Klaus After the war, he abandoned biological racialism.

He remained an Orientalist academic, and he ultimately converted to Islam.

That was the case with Karl Wolf, the SS adjutant to the Fuhrer.

The able lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey alone are sufficient to convince any fair-minded Christian that to accept the dead letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander.

But the fact to which even the most truth-loving and truth-searching Orientalists, whether Aryanists or Egyptologists, seem to remain blind is that every symbol on papyrus or ola is a many-faced diamond, each of whose facets not only includes several interpretations, but also relates to several sciences.

This is instanced in the just-quoted interpretation of the cat symbolizing the moon, an example of sidereal-terrestrial imagery, for the moon has with other nations many other meanings besides.

As a learned Mason and Theosophist, the late Kenneth Mackenzie, has shown in his Royal Masonic Encyclopedia, there is a great difference between emblem and symbol.

Each had its own symbolism.

Nature could thus be either read in its fullness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.

The proof of this lies to this day in the extreme difficulty which the Orientalists in general, the Indianists and Egyptologists especially, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the Aryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt.

This is because they will never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language which was universal, and known to all nations alike in days of old, but which is now intelligible only to the few, like the Arabic figures which are plain to a man of whatever nation, or like the English word and, which becomes a for the Frenchman, und for the German, and so on, yet which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign ampersand.

And that's kind of mapped onto, again, like the broader just erasure of black Muslims that were already on US soil.

I can't speak to how his writings may have changed around Muslim relations after having been in these wards, but my assumption is that they wouldn't have changed that much, right, because his, up until that point, he was already very comfortable sitting in those contradictions, right, so waging war on the one hand, invoking Orientalists and leaning on Orientalist tropes while also really sort of defending Muslim rights.

So when I say, when I mentioned like the idea about Muslims being the most difficult test case, it's really interesting because in that test case, there's a kind of, maybe not tested, a pretty explicit acknowledgement that this is a religion that we're really that this is a religion that's really sort of fearsome and seems so antithetical to U.S. values, but could we really include them as a testament to their own commitment, the Founding Fathers' own commitment to religious liberty? And so I would assume that even after the Barbary Wars, that that wouldn't change, right? Because a lot of the arguments were about like, oh, we need to think about how to include religions that we don't like or that we fear as a kind of testament to how far they're willing to go in their commitment to religious liberty.

Can we please thank

And so I've really wanted to bring Islam into, um, into dialogue with trends in religious studies at large, right? And so to get Islam out of that kind of, uh, box of Oriental studies.

And, you know, Orientalists have made all sorts of good contributions, but, um ...

So, you know, when I did my book on skepticism, right, at that point, um, it was assumed that, well, skepticism is only something that you find in ancient Greece and, and modern Europe, you know.

It's only rational people, right? [laughs] And yet it's a universal phenomenon.

That's what a secondary source would be.

And those are good, but why I say I always go to the older ones is because the older historians who did this, let's say in my field of Islam, they're known as the so-called Orientalists.

If you look at their...

And they were basically active, I mean, in the 1700s, even before that, but they're really their heydays, like the 1800s or the 19th century, and they're very scholarly.

I still do, the late Bernard Lewis.

you know, I think he was born in 1914 or something like that.

So he was like the fine, one of the final, um, representatives of the old school, the Orientalists as they were known.

Right.

European empires, specifically the British, colonized the Muslim world.

Are you with me? Western critics, like Orientalists and so on, began heavily attacking Islam, pointing at complex historical Hadiths and calling them barbaric and backwards.

In places like British-colonized India and Egypt, a few Muslim intellects panicked.

Instead of taking their time to explain the Hadiths to them, they looked for a defensive shortcut to make Islam look acceptable to the Western critics.

European empires, specifically the British, colonized the Muslim world.

Are you with me? Western critics, like Orientalists and so on, began heavily attacking Islam, pointing at complex historical Hadiths and calling them barbaric and backwards.

In places like British-colonized India and Egypt, a few Muslim intellects panicked.

Instead of taking their time to explain the Hadiths to them, they looked for a defensive shortcut to make Islam look acceptable to the Western critics.