Western apprehension of Islam is moral and cosmological, not empirical.

Evidence

The discriminations and refinements of Dante’s poetic grasp of Islam are an instance of the schematic, almost cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension. Empirical data about the Orient or about any of its parts count for very little; what matters and is decisive is what I have been calling the Orientalist vision, a vision by no means confined to the professional scholar, but rather the common possession of all who have thought about the Orient in the West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 185

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the Orientalist vision’ as a shared Western mode of apprehension that privileges moral-cosmological schema over empirical data about the Orient.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings built on Orientalism as a critical vocabulary; also echoes Isaiah Berlin’s critique of monist/final-order thinking.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 185