The pre-existing Orientalist archive blocks the traveler’s fresh experience of the Orient

Evidence

All pilgrimages to the Orient passed through, or had to pass through, the Biblical lands; most of them in fact were attempts either to relive or to liberate from the large, incredibly fecund Orient some portion of Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman actuality. For these pilgrims the Orientalized Orient, the Orient of Orientalist scholars, was a gauntlet to be run, just as the Bible, the Crusades, Islam, Napoleon, and Alexander were redoubtable predecessors to be reckoned with. Not only does a learned Orient inhibit the pilgrim’s musings and private fantasies; its very antecedence places barriers between the contemporary traveler and his writing, unless, as was the case with Nerval and Flaubert in their use of Lane, Orientalist work is severed from the library and caught in the aesthetic project. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 427

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of the Orientalized Orient as a ‘gauntlet to be run’ — the archive as inhibiting filter, a building-block concept the reader can carry forward.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the Foucauldian idea of discourse constraining what can be said/experienced, which later Islamophobia readings will assume.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 427