The Orientalist’s claim to expertise depends on the Orient’s presumed incapacity for self-interpretation

Evidence

For what he says, in effect, is that without people such as he the Middle East would be neglected; and that without his mediating, interpretative role the place would not be understood, partly because what little there is to understand is fairly peculiar, and partly because only the Orientalist can interpret the Orient, the Orient being radically incapable of interpreting itself. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 735

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the core mechanism of Orientalist authority: it justifies itself by denying the Orient the capacity to speak for itself — a foundational concept for the toolkit.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds into later postcolonial/Islamophobia readings on who gets to speak for the Muslim world.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 735