Modern Orientalist knowledge descends from secularized Christian supernaturalism, not objective discovery

Evidence

To the great modern system for the classification of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as marking the presence of a “reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism.” The emergence of this modern classification of cultures does not represent for Said “a sudden access of objective knowledge” but rather “a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Said’s core claim that Orientalism is a secularized religious framework — each modern discipline a laicized stand-in for Christian supernaturalism — is defined precisely here.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis: the fear/manufacture of the Muslim monster has a continuous chain from Christian medieval theology into modern secular ‘objective’ classification, matching the book’s earlier chapters on theological fabrication.