Enlightenment Europeans knew Orientals only through fantasy and conquest-serving reportage

Evidence

Educated Europeans of the early Enlightenment inherited a view of foreign peoples which was part-fantasy and part-hearsay, little more than an exotic fiction with which to expose the venality of European life, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, or reportage shaped in such a way as to administer a crude justification for economic penetration and religious conquest, as in Richard Haklut or Samuel Purchase. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 348

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism argument that Western knowledge of the Orient served power and conquest; also parallels the reader’s broader thesis on manufactured images.