Said indicted Orientalism while letting other Western disciplines pass unscathed

Evidence

Yet, for all the subversivity that Guénon mustered, his account lacks articulation insofar as the inner workings of Orientalism are concerned, insofar, that is, as the intimately structured organic connections between Orientalism and its epistemological, political, and cultural surrounds—those from which it emerged and with which it stood in a determined dialectic—are concerned. Guénon already made the first important step toward considering “official Orientalism” not only as integral to “Western civilization” but also as bound up with all corners of academia. For Guénon, there is no real distinction between the forms of knowledge that defined academic disciplines: they all issued from the same “civilizational” matrix, from the same worldview, one that possessed a single epistemological common denominator or a single foundational thought structure. For Said, the picture is not entirely coherent. Politically, he seemed to blame the West as a category for its destructive attitudes, but academically and epistemologically, he singles out Orientalism for indictment, letting the rest of the disciples pass unscathed (260). A strong man of the Enlightenment, Said could not see where the problem of Orientalism was, his view of knowledge being unsurprisingly provincial. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader postcolonial-studies charge that Enlightenment critique must extend to all disciplines, not just Orientalism — echoes of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘provincializing Europe.’
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether Said’s singling out of Orientalism was a strategic rhetorical narrowing or a genuine theoretical gap, and what his strong-man-of-the-Enlightenment commitments explain.