Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals

Evidence

When a learned Orientalist traveled in the country of his specialization, it was always with unshakable abstract maxims about the “civilization” he had studied; rarely were Orientalists interested in anything except proving the validity of these musty “truths” by applying them, without great success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate, natives. Finally, the very power and scope of Orientalism produced not only a fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient but also a kind of second-order knowledge—lurking in such places as the “Oriental” tale, the mythology of the mysterious East, notions of Asian inscrutability—with a life of its own, what V. G. Kiernan has aptly called “Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘second-order knowledge’ with a life of its own is a mechanism directly portable to Islamophobia studies — the stereotype-saturated discourse that circulates independently of any real Muslim community. — connects to: Orientalist painters invented imagery of Eastern despotism they never witnessed
• SEED: Angle: how ‘Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient’ persists in modern media’s autonomous Orientalist imagery that survives contact with actual Muslims.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151