The definition of the Orient is inseparable from the Western scholar’s identity

Evidence

Moreover, the Orient is no simple marvel, or an enemy, or a branch of exotica; it is a political actuality of great and significant moment. Like Lawrence, Macdonald cannot really detach his representative characteristics as a Westerner from his role as a scholar. Thus his vision of Islam, as much as Lawrence’s of the Arabs, implicates definition of the object with the identity of the person defining. All Arab Orientals must be accommodated to a vision of an Oriental type as constructed by the Western scholar, as well as to a specific encounter with the Orient in which the Westerner regrasps the Orient’s essence as a consequence of his intimate estrangement from it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 632

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the core mechanism by which Orientalist scholarship fuses the scholar’s Western identity with his object of study.
• XREF: Connects directly to the Islamophobia module’s interest in how ‘the Other’ is constructed; the scholar-defines-object mechanism prefigures later readings on representation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 632