The Orient was reduced to a weak model serving Western cultural needs

Evidence

Both Caussin and Carlyle, in other words, show us that the Orient need not cause us undue anxiety, so unequal are Oriental to European achievements. The Orientalist and non-Orientalist perspectives coincide here. For within the comparative field that Orientalism became after the philological revolution of the early nineteenth century, and outside it, either in popular stereotypes or in the figures made of the Orient by philosophers like Carlyle and stereotypes like those of Macaulay, the Orient in itself was subordinated intellectually to the West. As material for study or reflection the Orient acquired all the marks of an inherent weakness. It became subject to the vagaries of miscellaneous theories that used it for illustration. Cardinal Newman, no great Orientalist, used Oriental Islam as the basis of lectures in 1853 justifying British intervention in the Crimean War. Cuvier found the Orient useful for his work Le Règne animal (1816). The Orient was usefully employed as conversation in the various salons of Paris. The list of references, borrowings, and transformations that overtook the Oriental idea is immense, but at bottom what the early Orientalist achieved, and what the non-Orientalist in the West exploited, was a reduced model of the Orient suitable for the prevailing, dominant culture and its theoretical (and hard after the theoretical, the practical) exigencies. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 389

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core Orientalism mechanism: a reduced model of the Orient produced inside and outside the field, serving dominant culture’s theoretical and practical exigencies.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ‘the Muslim world’ is likewise reduced to a compliant, weak object of study rather than an autonomous actor.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 389