Orientalism operates as a secular quasi-religious faith akin to other nineteenth-century disciplines.

Evidence

In a highly compressed form this brief episode, taken out of Flaubert’s notes for Bouvard et Pécuchet, frames the specifically modern structures of Orientalism, which after all is one discipline among the secular (and quasi-religious) faiths of nineteenth-century European thought. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 322

Categorization

• XREF: The quasi-religious structure of Orientalism echoes the secularization theme the reader tracks across the critical-theory toolkit — how modern ‘secular’ disciplines inherit religious authority structures.
• ADDENDUM: Links to the broader pattern of how belief systems — whether dress panics or sacrifice rituals — get transmuted into modern secular institutions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 322