Scholarly Orientalism telescoped textual detail into policy about the whole Orient

Evidence

The point I am trying to make here is that the transition from a merely textual apprehension, formulation, or definition of the Orient to the putting of all this into practice in the Orient did take place, and that Orientalism had much to do with that—if I may use the word in a literal sense—preposterous transition. So far as its strictly scholarly work was concerned (and I find the idea of strictly scholarly work as disinterested and abstract hard to understand: still, we can allow it intellectually), Orientalism did a great many things. During its great age in the nineteenth century it produced scholars; it increased the number of languages taught in the West and the quantity of manuscripts edited, translated, and commented on; in many cases, it provided the Orient with sympathetic European students, genuinely interested in such matters as Sanskrit grammar, Phoenician numismatics, and Arabic poetry. Yet—and here we must be very clear—Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never revise itself. All this makes Cromer and Balfour, as observers and administrators of the Orient, inevitable. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 266

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism here — a single observation about a poet scaling into policy toward a whole region — is the textual-to-practical transition that later Islamophobia critiques (e.g. Williams, Mamdani) inherit; also connects to Foucault’s discourse analysis implicitly.
• DEFINE: Defines the core claim that Orientalism is not disinterested scholarship but a system that turns textual representation into administrative practice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 266