Orientalism is a political doctrine imposed because the Orient was weaker

Evidence

Thus Orientalism is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition (when one refers to an academic specialist who is called an Orientalist), as well as an area of concern defined by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilizations. … My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 510

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Orientalism as simultaneously a doctrine, an academic tradition, and a domain of Western concern — the core conceptual definition the reader is scaffolding toward.
• XREF: This ties directly to the reader’s stated goal: extracting Orientalism as a core concept that later Islamophobia readings assume.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 510