I'm not sure why you're singling out Muslim historians here. All (reputable) historians favor more recent scholarship, because scholars build on earlier work to make better and clearer, and sometimes different, arguments.

I did a reading list for my PhD exams on Muslim-Christian interaction in the medieval Mediterranean. The entire idea of a PhD list is to expose you to the most important scholarship in the field.

I am not Muslim and neither was the professor. The earliest book I read was from 1937, and it was paired with two much more recent ones to show how our understanding of that history has changed over time--including from things as basic as "looking at archaeology, too." And in other cases, it's a matter of, "hey, nobody has ever studied this topic."

The second-earliest book I read was 1975, and that was entirely military/naval history.

Most of the list was 2000+.

You don't need to bring trigger words like "leftist" and "anti-orientalist historians" into the picture. You just need to say historians.

the Middle Eastern people or Muslim historians in general tend to really hate orienatlists for 'altering their history'

To put it mildly I think this is a bit of an exaggeration.

Another commenter has mentioned Edward Said, it's worth noting that Edward Said's primary influence is not in Middle Eastern history departments but in literature departments.

Whatever ones views of Bernard Lewis (my own is that he was a talented Turkologist at the start of his career who ended up having wildly divisive political opinions in the latter half of his very long life), his critique of Said's Orientalism that he ignores the value of pure philology rings obviously true in my opinion.

To give an extreme example: The most important modern English-Arabic dictionary, the Hans Wehr dictionary, was written by a literal Nazi. Now there's a whole critique of Said that he ignores German Orientalists because the Germans didn't actually create an Orientalist empire of the kind he describes compared to the British and the French, but putting that aside, surely the reprehensible views of a literal Nazi would taint that scholarship?

Actually...not really.

It turns out the philological and historical value of the "Orientalists" who conducted Oriental Studies in the 19th and early 20th century is immense.

Another Orientalist singled out by Said, Edward William Lane (mostly directed at his ethnographic Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians) is also the author of the most important classical Arabic-English dictionary, Lane's Lexicon, largely drawing on the medieval Arabic dictionary Lisan al-Arab.

Again it's all well and good to say that these people were racists--many of them were. They also wrote damn good dictionaries.

Where I think this becomes more complicated, and where the term "Orientalist" gets extremely complicated is in understanding the role of critical history in the history of Islam and the Middle East.

Patricia Crone, one of the most important historians of the second half of the twentieth century, prefaced one of her early books by saying that it was history "by infidels, and for infidels."

That, I think, has to be the approach of critical western historians (though there are very important alternative veins of research) particularly to early Islamic history. I also understand fully why devout Muslims would find that to be "altering their history", just as I understand why various forms of evangelical Christians find, say, biblical analysis to be altering their history.

But the fact remains that I don't think the "orientalist" issue, 40+ years after Said's Orientalism is nearly so difficult to tackle today.