Orientalistics as Ideologization of Science

Abstract

Orientalistics as a science is strongly contaminated by ideology, often by prejudices against the world and culture within its research focus, i.e. against oriental Islamic culture and Muslims. I detected it when I still served as assistant professor and therefore engaged in a public polemic with Darko Tanasković and some other Orientalists, and the polemic played itself out as a polemic on Eurocentrism in the national media of Socialist Yugoslavia. Years later, Edward Said published his celebrated work on this topic under the title „Orientalism”. The evidence of the mentioned ideologization and uncertainty in naming this scientific field also lies in the fact that the Department of the Arabic Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, later the Department of Orientalistics, changed its name several times. Finally, as a professor of that faculty, in a Faculty Council meeting held in 2003, I argued in favour of naming it „the Department of Oriental Philology”, and I succeeded, namely a name that distances itself from the compromised name „Orientalism”, i.e. a name that is ideologically neutral. This is important especially because significant part of the Bosniak heritage originated in Oriental languages, so that this science in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have the same status as, for instance, in other European countries.