Before engaging in such a revisionist assessment of Said's contributions, I would suggest that Kamiya compare the quality of the works produced on the Islamic world in the West in the time prior to the publication of Orientalism and the quality of the works published thereafter.  There is no doubt that Orientalism can be attacked in many of its details, and even its broad conclusion can be attacked as an oversimplification.  That does not detract from the contribution of the work, however, nor does it help us assess objectively whether its impact on knowledge was positive or negative. 

I have no doubt that the impact of Orientalism on Islamic Studies was profoundly positive.  In my field, Islamic legal history, a quick perusal of works written by the recognized "giants" of the field -- Noel Coulson and Joseph Schact -- shows that they routinely made sweeping generalizations based on a posited ahistorical "essence" of Islamic law that was, unsurprisingly, inferior to the "essence" of western legal systems.  Specifically, they regularly assumed that Islamic law was immutable -- solely because it was religious -- even though significant evidence to the contrary was available to them. 

Baber Johansen, a professor of Islamic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School and Acting Director of the Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program, for example, criticized Schacht in his work Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (1999) for failing to recognize the importance of dissent and pluralism in substantive Islamic law due to Schacht's being "too much part of an occidental tradition which understands the legitimacy of the dissent on principles as a specific western form of modern political and religious culture so that he cannot envisage its existence in a non-occidental sacred law or deontology."  Professor Johansen makes the larger point that many of the critical conceptual categories that infuse older Western studies of Islamic law (i.e. prior to Orientalism) were suffused with casual use of Weberian terms that led researchers like Schacht simply to ignore contrary evidence. 

Therein lies the revolutionary contribution Said made to a field -- Islamic Studies -- that was not even his own: he showed how ideological commitments -- in this case commitments to the superiority of Western civilization -- could not only lead to profound mischaracterizations of the subject of study, but also how such errors can become core doctrines of a discipline.  In other words, doctrines, parading in the language of objective scientific description, can become hegemonic in spite of their falsity precisely because they confirm ideological biases.  That in sum explains the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq and the Muslim world in general.  It is not an accident that the administration relies on someone like Bernard Lewis -- even though he is no longer on the cutting edge of scholarship in Islamic Studies -- and not scholars like Juan Cole who, arguably, have assimilated the lessons of Orientalism.

Said wrote at a time that profound methodological naivete prevailed in Islamic Studies.  His criticism of that naivete was devastating, even if his theory does not map out precisely onto all authorities, such as Ignaz Goldziher.  As a graduate student, Orientalism had a profound impact upon me in that it gave me the courage to re-think many of the assumptions that pre-Orientalist authors took for granted regarding Islamic law.  If Orientalism taught scholars of Islamic Studies only that method matters, that would be sufficient to make it part of our canon. 

So, before Makiya goes about trashing Said's contribution, I suggest he consider this counter-factual: what would Islamic Studies look like without Said's criticisms?  I know that the study of Islamic legal history would be dead, because authorities such as Coulson and Schacht essentially posited that the notion of Islamic legal history was oxymoronic -- there was no need to study the details of the 14 centuries of Islamic law because it was all, in essence, the same.  Said taught us that such a conclusion is ideology, not knowledge, and thank God, many of us learned his lesson, rolled up our sleeves, and began to take the notion that Muslims had a history seriously.  I know that my field of Islamic legal history has been considerably enriched as a result.  The same is true of the literature of Islamic societies.  I'm sure the same is true for the study of art in the Islamic world and no doubt also explains the increased attention to the study of the social history of the Islamic world.

Mohammed Fadel is professor of law at Univ. of Toronto School of Law and a VIP at Eteraz.Org