The Orient studied by scholars is a political system of representations, not raw reality

Evidence

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition of Orientalism seems more political than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces and activities. Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilizations, peoples, and localities. Its objective discoveries-the work of innumerable devoted scholars who edited texts and translated them, codified grammars, wrote dictionaries, reconstructed dead epochs, produced positivistically verifiable learning-are and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by language, are embodied in language, and what is the truth of language, Nietzsche once said, but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 507

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the Orient in Orientalism’ as a system of representations produced by political forces — the field’s central constructivist move.
• XREF: The representation-versus-reality point connects directly to the construction of the ‘Other’ in later Islamophobia readings; also to Nietzsche on truth. — connects to: The study’s character types were built from political doctrines, not psychology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 705
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 507