The negative Orientalist portrayals Said condemned began with colonized Christian subjects, not colonizers.

Evidence

Terence Hawkes has said that “a colonist acts essentially as a dramatist. He imposes the ‘shape’ of his own culture, embodied in his speech, on the new world and makes that world recognizable, habitable, ‘natural,’ able to speak his language.” The same could be said for the colonized, in this case for Eastern Christians during the first two Muslim centuries. Refusing to acknowledge the fundamental and irreversible nature of the advent of Islam, they imposed the familiar forms of the old Christian Roman commonwealth on the new world of Islam, casting their adversaries (especially Muhammad) in familiar and despised roles, roles that allowed the Christian writer to hope for a happy ending. The negative “orientalist” portrayals of Islam that Edward Said denounces in his Orientalism as the ideological underpinnings of French and British colonialism in fact have their origins in the defensive reactions of Christian “orientals,” unwitting subjects of the new Muslim empire. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages and complicates Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis; also connects to the imitatio/drama framing in Goffmanesque culture-imposition that resonates with Tracy Kidder-style colonial frames.
• SEED: Article angle: the colonized-as-dramatist reversal — how a conquered people’s defensive act of imposing familiar narrative shapes on new reality became the template for the colonizer’s later ideology. The origin paradox of Orientalism.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which ‘Orientalism’ as ideological overlay first emerged: not from the powerful but from the conquered.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses a foundational critical-theory assumption (Said’s provenance for Orientalism) with a genuinely counterintuitive genealogy; sits with the reader well beyond one summary.