Colonial archives jointly form a historical experience rather than opposing static civilizations.

Evidence

In other words, rather than remaining as inert documents that testify to an eternally opposed Occident and Orient, the Déscription and Jabarti’s chronicles together constitute a historical experience, out of which others evolved, and before which others existed. Studying the historical dynamics of this set of experiences is more demanding than sliding back into stereotypes like “the conflict of East and West.” That is one reason why Orientalism is mistakenly read as a surreptitiously anti-Western work and, by an act of unwarranted and even willful retrospective endowment, this reading (like all readings based on a supposedly stable binary opposition) elevates the image of an innocent and aggrieved Islam. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the reified binary the reader’s Islamophobia literature assumes; prefigures ‘the imagined community’ and the constructed Other.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 842