Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities

Evidence

In practice this notion has meant that when Orientals struggle against colonial occupation, you must say (in order not to risk a Disneyism) that Orientals have never understood the meaning of self-government the way “we” do. When some Orientals oppose racial discrimination while others practice it, you say “they’re all Orientals at bottom” and class interest, political circumstances, economic factors are totally irrelevant. Or with Bernard Lewis, you say that if Arab Palestinians oppose Israeli settlement and occupation of their lands, then that is merely “the return of Islam,” or, as a renowned contemporary Orientalist defines it, Islamic opposition to non-Islamic peoples, a principle of Islam enshrined in the seventh century. History, politics, and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 300

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete demonstration of what ‘essentialism’ means in practice — reducing heterogeneous Oriental realities to a timeless, unchanging essence.
• XREF: Directly serves the scaffold into Islamophobia readings: this is the mechanism by which ‘Islam is Islam’ thinking recurs in anti-Muslim discourse. — connects to: Orientalism’s totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation; Orientalism’s totalizing victim narrative erases home-country wrongs and oppositional histories like Marxism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 817
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 300