SOURCE: “The Scope of Orientalism,” in Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 31-110.

In the following excerpt, Said explores the treatment of Oriental culture in the West, contending that the limitations of Orientalism stem from disregarding, essentializing, and denuding another culture, people, or geographical region.

… [The Orientalist attitude] shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter. The European encounter with the Orient, and specifically with Islam, strengthened this system of representing the Orient and, as has been suggested by Henri Pirenne, turned Islam into the very epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization from the Middle Ages on was founded. The decline of the Roman Empire as a result of...