"...here I have a very strong objection to what Edward Said writes in his book Orientalism. I am sure this book is very popular with you and I think it is very important for me to say that, there were many European intellectuals who wrote without any explicit design of hegemonizing the people they were writing about,their purpose was intellectual not political, what Edward said has done is great disservice to knowledge that he has turned entire landscape into a flat land where every European writing on Islam particularly, or on India is harboring some kind of a nefarious design to control, that I think is most vulnerable part of Edward Said's book Orientalism ..., this is about anybody who is an outsider, therefore I would like to mention this very strongly, this outsider insider debate, people who are not Indians do not should not write on India, people who are not Muslim should not write on Islam because they will never understand Islam,...; I am afraid all these things are totally redundant in our world of professional historical research which has lot of drawbacks and weakness which we try to fine tune, except for this kind of artificial divide between, 'us better equipped Muslims and they ill equipped non Muslims to understand religion and politics',... so there fore ...Some of them writing also to control India so I am not saying that element of control is absent, very much there..."

“In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in.”

“The intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.”

“When one learns something one first performs an act of will, because only by willing to learn can one learn.”

“To set my cards out on the table at this early stage, that book seems to me a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.”

“The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. ... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”

“A historian of science is not expected to be a scientist, but he is expected to have some basic knowledge of the scientific alphabet. Similarly, a historian of Orientalism—that is to say, the work of historians and philologists—should have at least some acquaintance with the history and philology with which they were concerned. Mr. Said shows astonishing blind spots. He asserts that “Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on ” —that is, when the Ottoman Turks who ruled the eastern Mediterranean were just leaving Austria and Hungary. This rearrangement of history is necessary for Mr. Said’s thesis; others are apparently due to unpolemical ignorance—for example his belief that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before North Africa —that is to say, that the eleventh century came before, the seventh, and that Egypt was “annexed” by England . Egypt was indeed occupied and dominated, but was never annexed or directly administered. In another remarkable passage, he chides the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel because, even after he “had practically renounced his Orientalism, he still held that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages” . Mr. Said seems to object to this view—which would not be challenged by any serious philologist—and regards it as a pernicious residue of Schlegel’s former Orientalism”