Said’s Orientalism critique lacks the historical and geographical distinctions to define its target audience

Evidence

The absence of historical distinctions in Said’s understanding of Orientalism (from the evidence presented earlier alone) is intimately coupled with gross geographical indistinctions. Aeschylus, Homer, scholastic scholars, Dante, Renan, Massignon, and Lewis are viewed in the same vein. The only commonality, which we infer as existing in Said’s mind, is that, again, they write from a geographical location identified as the “West” about the Orient, at times tagged as “East.” There is no single “Easterner” or “Oriental” in Said’s definition who engaged with the “Orient.” … That Said appears not to have read Tyan or to have known of Guénon, or, still, to have cared in the least about legal Orientalism, or westward Orientalism, is a matter whose significance is to be discussed later. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to subaltern and postcolonial debates about whether ‘the West’ is a coherent category; echoes the author’s own reflection in chapter 3 on Guénon and dissenting authorship.