Western scholarship claimed monopoly on truth about an Orient it invented

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: This raises the reader’s core question: if the constructed Orient is ontologically fixed and immune to empirical dislodging, what could ever dismantle it? Worth chasing the author’s implied answer.
• XREF: Echoes Said’s thesis on Orientalism’s self-sealing circularity, and parallels the reader’s ‘fear without an object’ concern.

Related

• Western scholars declared the Orient’s fixed essence unknowable by its own people (similarity 0.92)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.85)
• Both the Orient and the West are constructed fictions, not stable realities (similarity 0.85)
• The Orient cannot represent itself and needs the Western expert to testify. (similarity 0.85)
• The West’s Muslims are fictional characters in a story about itself. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism undermines the possibility of nonpolitical scholarship. (similarity 0.84)
• Empiricist assumptions locked Orientals into unescapable determining origins (similarity 0.83)
• Orient and West are unstable human constructs, not fixed realities (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.83)
• All Western writers treated the Orient as fixed, feminine, and needing redemption (similarity 0.83)
• Centuries of Orientalist scholarship have functioned as domination and violence (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist categories can contradict what Muslims would say about themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalization results from power and domination, not merely imaginative necessity (similarity 0.82)
• Europe’s self-formation against an Other does not require an actual Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. (similarity 0.82)