Even sympathetic Orientalists deny the Orient any positive political desire or agency

Evidence

For all his expressed humanism, his admirable concern for fellow creatures, Lévi conceives the present juncture in unpleasantly constricted terms. The Oriental is imagined to feel his world threatened by a superior civilization; yet his motives are impelled, not by some positive desire for freedom, political independence, or cultural achievement on their own terms, but instead by rancor or jealous malice. The panacea offered for this potentially ugly turn of affairs is that the Orient be marketed for a Western consumer, be put before him as one among numerous wares beseeching his attention. By a single stroke you will defuse the Orient (by letting it think itself to be an “equal” quantity on the Occidental marketplace of ideas), and you will appease Western fears of an Oriental tidal wave. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 640

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings — the ‘no positive desire, only rancor’ trope recurs in contemporary coverage of Muslim political agency.
• DEFINE: Illustrates how the Orientalist imaginary strips the colonized of self-directed motive, a mechanism later readings rely on.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 640