Orientalism endures because material investment sustains it, not because it is true

Evidence

I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Orientalism as a ‘created body of theory and practice’ backed by material investment — defining its status as discourse rather than truth or mere lies.
• XREF: This is the scaffolding point the reader needs: Orientalism as a durable institutionalized grid, which the Islamophobia field will inherit as a mechanism for understanding how anti-Muslim discourse persists across centuries.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 61