Scholarly necessity and ethnocentric prejudice worked together to flatten the Orient’s humanity.

Evidence

Whether this comparative attitude is principally a scholarly necessity or whether it is disguised ethnocentric race prejudice, we cannot say with absolute certainty. What we can say is that the two work together, in support of each other. What Renan and Sacy tried to do was to reduce the Orient to a kind of human flatness, which exposed its characteristics easily to scrutiny and removed from it its complicating humanity. In Renan’s case, the legitimacy of his efforts was provided by philology, whose ideological tenets encourage the reduction of a language to its roots; thereafter, the philologist finds it possible to connect those linguistics roots, as Renan and others did, to race, mind, character, and temperament at their roots. The affinity between Renan and Gobineau, for example, was acknowledged by Renan to be a common philological and Orientalist perspective; in subsequent editions of the Histoire générale he incorporated some of Gobineau’s work within his own. Thus did comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 384

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines how comparatism became synonymous with ontological inequality—the core Orientalist move.
• XREF: Foundation for how the reader’s Islamophobia readings will trace racialized selfhood to putatively neutral philology/science.
• QUESTION: The ‘reduction of a language to its roots’ logic deserves deeper unpacking—what does root-reduction mean methodologically?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 384