The First International Congress of Orientalists was held in Paris in 1873. In Edward Said’s account, it marks an early public sign that Islamic and Semitic scholarship was lagging behind other areas of Orientalist learning: scholars saw the ancient-Semitic field as advancing, but judged the modern-Semitic section by a markedly less ambitious standard. The congress therefore matters not simply as an academic gathering, but as evidence of how inherited religious frameworks and racialized classifications persisted within learned study.

Setting and Scholarly Context

Said places the congress within a longer history of Islamic Orientalism that, compared with other human sciences and even other branches of Orientalism, remained methodologically and ideologically backward and relatively insulated from developments in the humanities and from historical, economic, social, and political circumstances. He suggests that this lag was already discernible in the late nineteenth century, partly because Semitic and Islamic studies had not substantially loosened their ties to the religious background from which they emerged.

The first congress, convened in Paris in 1873, made the contrast visible to other scholars. In surveying the congresses held between 1873 and 1897, the English scholar R. N. Cust distinguished the ancient-Semitic field, which he said advanced Oriental learning, from the modern-Semitic section. The latter was crowded, but its discussions, in his assessment, were of limited literary interest and belonged to the habits of an older generation of dilettante scholarship rather than to the comparative philological and archaeological spirit of the nineteenth century.

Cust’s Criticism of the Modern-Semitic Section

Cust described the modern-Semitic sessions as lacking both modern philological and archaeological approaches. He compared their reports to those of university tutors from an earlier century debating the interpretation of a Greek play or the accentuation of a vowel, activities he presented as superseded by comparative philology. His criticism was directed not at a lack of attendance—the section was crowded—but at the narrowness and antiquarian character of the subjects being discussed.

One example sharpened his objection: he questioned whether it was worthwhile to debate whether Muhammad could hold a pen or write. The issue, in Said’s presentation, is not just the triviality Cust attributed to a particular topic. The question shows how modern Islamic scholarship could remain occupied with antiquarian disputes even as other scholarly fields claimed newer methods and broader intellectual aims.

Racialized Categories and Lasting Significance

Said reads the polemical antiquarianism Cust described as a scholarly expression of European anti-Semitism. The label “modern-Semitic” was intended to include both Muslims and Jews, and, despite its apparently academic form, carried forward a racial classification. The opposition between “the Aryan” and “the Semite” made that classification especially clear: the former operated as a counter-abstraction to the latter, while Semites were treated as a group to which such inherited labels were particularly applicable.

For Said, the congress survey exposes more than an uneven distribution of scholarly methods. Orientalism helped give academic and intellectual legitimacy to atavistic categories, and that legitimacy persisted into modern discussions of Islam, Arabs, and the Near Orient. He contrasts the declining acceptability of general claims about “the Negro mind” or “the Jewish personality” with the continued possibility of research framed around an “Islamic mind” or “Arab character.” The congress’s significance thus lies in the way an apparently specialized scholarly division reveals the broader endurance of racialized assumptions within the study of Muslim and Arab societies.