Claims to objectivity themselves constitute the culminating Orientalist dogma

Evidence

One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists like Lewis writing about Muslims and Arabs are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 811

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mature Orientalist position: the objectivity claim is not neutral scholarly method but the final form of the dogma itself, degrading its subject and blinding its practitioners.
• XREF: This is the term of art for how ‘objectivity’ functions as a claim to epistemic authority — connects to Gramscian hegemony and to later Islamophobia readings on who gets to define reality.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that the self-aware profession of objectivity is precisely the dogma’s terminal mode — is dense enough to sit with; it reframes impartiality itself as a weapon rather than a virtue.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 811