Western scholars declared the Orient’s fixed essence unknowable by its own people

Evidence

Because the Oriental was deemed incapable of serious thought, only the European or American scholar could do this work. After all, the Orient was created by and for the West, and under this system, “objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.” No wonder the fantasies of the East have been so difficult to dismantle. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 41

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘objects are what they are… for ontological reasons’ fixed-essence claim resonates with the Frankfurt School critique of reification — the reader’s parallel knowledge base on Adorno.