Said denied the real Orient to avoid correcting scholars and confronting its nonsecular reality

Evidence

James Clifford aptly argues that Said frequently suggests that an Orientalist text “distorts, dominates, or ignores some real or authentic feature of the Orient. Elsewhere, however, he denies the existence of any ‘real Orient.’ … Said’s concept of ‘discourse’ still vacillates between, on the one hand, the status of an ideological distortion of lives and cultures that are never concretized and, on the other, the condition of a persistent structure of signifiers that, like some extreme example of experimental writing, refers solely and endlessly to itself. Said is thus forced to rely on nearly tautological statements.” While Clifford may be right that the denial of any “real Orient” is a “significant methodological choice,” it is likely (and this is integral to my argument) that Said perhaps knew that acknowledging any such reality would have led him to two difficulties: first, condemning the Orientalists’ depictions of the Orient would then require him to offer his corrections, which he elected not to do; and second, he would then have to reckon with his own finding about that “real Orient,” which is nonsecular, traditional, and perhaps offensive to modern liberal sensibilities, Said’s included. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 110

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the internal tension in Said’s Orientalism between ideological distortion and self-referential discourse.
• XREF: Connects to debates about whether critique requires a substantive alternative — parallels Fraser on recognition vs. redistribution.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 110