Said’s one-directional account of Orientalism is a deliberate discursive strategy, not scholarly error.

Evidence

Misrepresenting the Orient, the major theme of Said’s work, is an effect of the forces working on Orientalism, by virtue of having this discipline “reinforced by the colonial encounter” (39–40). I shall discuss this matter at length later, but wish here to make the point that the suppression of a strong dialectic between colonialism and Orientalism, and, more importantly, between Orientalism and the “surrounding culture,” is not mere inattention to the analytics of power’s dynamics, a scholarly failure, so to speak. This is no scholarly failure at all, for, as I argue throughout, this type of discourse is the function of what Foucault called a “discursive strategy” whose ontological mode requires keeping the dialectic either suppressed, silent, or at bay. Changing this element in the discursive strategy would have entailed changing everything else, including the partial reservations about the otherwise totalizing and imperial liberalism, secularism, and ideological others. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 107

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a scholar’s analytic blind spot can be structurally required by the discourse itself—not a failing but a condition of the argument’s coherence—is genuinely paradigm-shifting about how critique operates.
• XREF: Resonates with Foucault’s own ‘discursive strategy’ concept and with the critique that Said’s Orientalism ironically reproduces the very unidirectionality it diagnoses.