Global events after 1978 hardened the us-versus-them binary Orientalism describes.

Evidence

The second reason why the anti-essentialism of my arguments has proved hard to accept is political and urgently ideological. I had absolutely no way of knowing that, a year after the book was published, Iran would be the site of an extraordinarily far-reaching Islamic revolution, nor that the battle between Israel and the Palestinians would take such savage and protracted forms, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the onset of the intifada in late 1987. The end of the Cold War did not mute, much less terminate, the apparently unending conflict between East and West as represented by the Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the other. More recent, but no less acute, contests developed as a result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan; the challenge to the status quo during the 1980s and ’90s made by Islamic groups in countries as diverse as Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories, and the various American and European responses: the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan; the Gulf War; the continued support of Israel; and the emergence of “Islam” as a topic of alarmed, if not always precise and informed, journalism and scholarship. All this inflamed the sense of persecution felt by people forced, on an almost daily basis, to declare themselves to be either Westerners or Easterners. No one seemed to be free from the opposition between “us” and “them,” which resulted in a sense of reinforced, deepened, hardened identity that has not been particularly edifying. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 843

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Fits the scaffold on the imagined community and the construction of the Other, feeding the Islamophobia field’s origin story about the hardening of Islam as a category after 1979.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 843