Colonial discourse constructed the European and Oriental minds as fixed binary opposites

Evidence

The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 124

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Orientalism’s foundational binary in its raw colonial form: European reason versus Oriental logical deficiency, which Said will later theorize as the very structure of Orientalist representation.
• XREF: The binary construction of colonizer/colonized psyches prefigures postcolonial psychology frameworks the reader will meet in later Islamophobia readings. Direct antecedent of Fanon’s and Memmi’s accounts of colonial psychic splitting. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 124