Feb 6, 2017
According to [Edward] Said, “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” In other words, Orientalist discourse is the systematic academic discipline of dominating, controlling, and managing the so-called Orient for the sake of the Western imperial political agenda. The Orient, in this account, is not the Far East, but rather primarily refers to what we call the Middle East, and for Said principally the Islamic Orient. His conclusion is that, as a result of the Orientalist discourse, Islam “has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West.
Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound