Orientalist scholarship widens rather than bridges the East-West divide

Evidence

Yet, despite the deeply structural understanding that Guénon attained (with the implication that a powerful discursive formation is at play), he was not so categorical or totalizing about the Orientalists. He acknowledged the existence of “certain individual exceptions” among Orientalists, but on the whole, these exceptions do not avert, much less subvert, the dominant and dominating tendencies. … But instead of attempting to create a kind of knowledge that leads to rapprochement between East and West, “Orientalism is widening the gulf” between them, for Orientalist discourse produces one of two effects, and neither is reassuring in the least. The reader of Orientalist works either develops a distaste for the East that “strengthen[s] his Western prejudice” or finds them “so absurd or so devoid of sense” that he will lose all interest. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 316