Fieldwork immersion in the Orient still preserved the Orientalist’s secret European authority.

Evidence

While Lane dallies in his preface with a Dr. Russell’s “account of the people of Aleppo” (a forgotten work), it is obvious that the Description de l’Égypte is his main antecedent competition. But that work, confined by Lane to a long footnote, is mentioned in contemptuous quotation marks as “the great French work” on Egypt. That work was at once too philosophically general and too careless, Lane says; and Jacob Burckhardt’s famous study was merely a collection of proverbial Egyptian wisdom, “bad tests of the morality of a people.” Unlike the French and Burckhardt, Lane was able to submerge himself amongst the natives, to live as they did, to conform to their habits, and “to escape exciting, in strangers, any suspicion of … being a person who had no right to intrude among them.” Lest that imply Lane’s having lost his objectivity, he goes on to say that he conformed only to the words (his italics) of the Koran, and that he was always aware of his difference from an essentially alien culture. Thus while one portion of Lane’s identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 407

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the mechanism by which ‘sympathetic immersion’ in Orientalism preserves rather than dissolves colonial authority — the informing contradiction Lane must manage.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the later Islamophobia readings on how the sympathetic/empathetic Western observer compiles authoritative knowledge about Muslims; connects to Foucault’s confessional power and to the ‘good Muslim’ observer trope.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 407