According to simplistic textbook knowledge about Edward Said's Orientalism, there was an intimate complicity between oriental studies and colonial domination. The allegations of Orientalism - the sophisticated polemic of a learned academic and public intellectual from the United States - have become conventional wisdom about an entire scholarly field. In analyzing the origins and rise of the academic discipline of Islamic studies, this book challenges the fundamentally reductive and pejorative interpretation of European scholarship on Islam. Applying both macro and micro level perspectives, this book investigates the complexities of the relationship between religion, science, and colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, putting on trial the trivialization of Edward Said's work.