Orientalist scholarship confirms rather than unsettles existing ideas about the Orient.

Evidence

When Galland said of d’Herbelot that he satisfied one’s expectations he meant, I think, that the Bibliothèque did not attempt to revise commonly received ideas about the Orient. For what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers’ eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions. All the Bibliothèque orientale did was represent the Orient more fully and more clearly; what may have been a loose collection of randomly acquired facts concerning vaguely Levantine history, Biblical imagery, Islamic culture, place names, and so on were transformed into a rational Oriental panorama, from A to Z. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Core proposition that the critical-theory toolkit carries forward: knowledge production functions as confirmation of prior conviction rather than revision — connects to hegemonic ‘common sense’ and to Foucault’s discourse as reinforcement of power.
• DEFINE: Defines the Orientalist operation: rendering the Orient as a rational, alphabetized panorama that leaves existing European beliefs intact.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 173