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Acknowledgments:
The research for this article was funded by the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford. It was originally delivered as a paper at the Durham University Colonial and Postcolonial History seminar in February 2007, and I thank David Moon and Berny Sèbe for their suggestions then. I am grateful to Beatrice Penati, Joe Perkins, Philipp Reichmuth, Benedetta Rossi, Paolo Sartori, Thomas Welsford, and the anonymous reviewers at Comparative Studies in Society and History for their comments on earlier drafts, which have improved it beyond all recognition.
Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an "Orientalist" was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for "Oriental Learning"--the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit--in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the "Anglicists" led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic "Orientalist" judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, "A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,"2 which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.3
This vignette shows clearly enough how the meaning of "Orientalist" has changed (and continues to change) over the years. For the purposes of this article I will use the term without inverted commas to indicate a scholar who studies the East, normally the Islamic world and its dominant languages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, and with inverted commas when referring to Said's largely pejorative use of it....