The sheer asymmetry of knowledge production signals Western dominance over the East

Evidence

The very presence of a “field” such as Orientalism, with no corresponding equivalent in the Orient itself, suggests the relative strength of Orient and Occident. A vast number of pages on the Orient exist, and they of course signify a degree and quantity of interaction with the Orient that are quite formidable; but the crucial index of Western strength is that there is no possibility of comparing the movement of Westerners eastwards (since the end of the eighteenth century) with the movement of Easterners westwards. Leaving aside the fact that Western armies, consular corps, merchants, and scientific and archaeological expeditions were always going East, the number of travelers from the Islamic East to Europe between 1800 and 1900 is minuscule when compared with the number in the other direction. Moreover, the Eastern travelers in the West were there to learn from and to gape at an advanced culture; the purposes of the Western travelers in the Orient were, as we have seen, of quite a different order. In addition, it has been estimated that around 60,000 books dealing with the Near Orient were written between 1800 and 1950; there is no remotely comparable figure for Oriental books about the West. As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge. The Orient existed for the West, or so it seemed to countless Orientalists, whose attitude to what they worked on was either paternalistic or candidly condescending—unless, of course, they were antiquarians, in which case the “classical” Orient was a credit to them and not to the lamentable modern Orient. And then, beefing up the Western scholars’ work, there were numerous agencies and institutions with no parallels in Oriental society. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 511

Categorization

• XREF: The quantitative asymmetry echoes the field-vs-subject power dynamic that later Islamophobia literature builds on; also connects to the definitional core of Orientalism as a field with no Oriental equivalent. — connects to: Metropolitan institutions assemble and control most knowledge produced about the Third World; Metropolitan institutions staffed by Westerners generate most Third World knowledge — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 309
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 511