Orient originally designated the Middle East and Islamic world, not Asia

Evidence

The term orientalist, to us at the present time, seems remarkably vague, but when it first came into use it was not by any means as vague. The Orient meant what we now call the Middle East. Even as late at the 19th century, when diplomats talked of the eastern question (or la question d’orient) they knew perfectly well that they were talking about the Ot­ toman Empire and not about China or Japan or India. The Orient, literally the sunrise, meant above all that which lay immediately to the east of Europe, and for a very long time the terms orient and oriental, in West European usage, in fact meant the Islamic world. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2065

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘orient’ originally meant the Middle East/Islamic world in West European usage, a fact Lost to later American conflation with the Far East.
• XREF: Directly speaks to the genealogy of representation that Said’s Orientalism traces — Orientalism as a term-of-art about the Islamic world interacts with his thesis.