Even sympathetic Orientalists like Gibb and Massignon ultimately served the colonialist discourse.

Evidence

Said singled out mainly two Orientalists—Gibb and Massignon—whose work was often sensitive to the objects of their scholarship, in this case Muslim Orientals, but the final verdict of both was negative. When all is said and done, neither scholar passed the test of adequate, accurate, truthful, and complete representation of the Orient. In other words, if either of the two had a “determining imprint,” it was an imprint that, in the final analysis, conduced to the discursive formation in which Orientalism ultimately implicated itself, in colonialist power overseas, in political power at home, and in misrepresentation itself in the first place. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 273

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the test Said applied to Orientalists: the determining imprint of their scholarship, regardless of individual sensitivity, locates them within the colonialist discursive formation.