The Orientalism debate presumes scholarship and ideology are opposites

Evidence

Anyone familiar with debates on Orientalism comes to the realization that there is a profound ambiguity in the meaning of the term that designates this field of scholarship. Essential to this confusion is the matter of classification. Is Orientalism an academic scholarly field or is it an ideological construction, to be treated no different than one would treat any bias-laden discourse? The assumption guiding both the question and the quest for classification is that scholarly discourse is not and should not be ideological, that ideology in fact stands at the other extreme end of dispassionate, objective scholarship. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 9

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the classification problem at the heart of the term: is Orientalism an academic field or an ideological discourse, and why that binary itself is the contested assumption.