Orientalist scholars were a diverse group spanning nations, religions, and politics

Evidence

By claiming that orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” Said turns his own imperious gaze on orientalist scholars. The result is that it is now they who become the undifferentiated mass. But they were most decidedly not this. Orientalists came from a host of nations, sometimes representing colonial interests, sometimes not, and were of different ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 375

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to Milgrom and the law-merchant literature about internal heterogeneity being erased by a label — similar ‘lumping’ critique. — connects to: Orientalist scholarship constructed ‘Indian Literature’ as Sanskritic, religious, and North Indian, excluding Tamil. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1134; Orientalist scholarship was overwhelmingly dominated by Western scholars into the 1920s