Orientalist writing edited the Orient to shield European sensibility from its strangeness

Evidence

Every European traveler or resident in the Orient has had to protect himself from its unsettling influences. Someone like Lane ultimately rescheduled and resituated the Orient when he came to write about it. The eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality, were reduced considerably when they appeared as a series of detailed items presented in a normative European prose style. It is correct to say that in Orientalizing the Orient, Lane not only defined but edited it; he excised from it what, in addition to his own human sympathies, might have ruffled the European sensibility. In most cases, the Orient seemed to have offended sexual propriety; everything about the Orient—or at least Lane’s Orient-in-Egypt—exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive “freedom of intercourse,” as Lane put it more irrepressibly than usual. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 422

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which ‘Orientalizing’ means not just describing but editing, excising, and normativizing the Orient.
• XREF: This ‘editing’ mechanism prefigures later postcolonial arguments about how colonial knowledge production reshapes its object; connects to the scaffolding of representation/islamophobia theory.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 422