Orientalism Is a Symptom Not the Disease
Edward Said's Orientalism identified a real problem the systematic Western misrepresentation of Muslim and Eastern societies. But Said only described the thief; he never traced the crime back to its cause.
"Tools and instruments deriving from a central domain that is, from the very structures through which the domain itself was constituted cannot be of service in reconstituting the domain. By virtue of their structure, such instruments can function as correctives and enhancements, but cannot perform tasks qualitatively at variance with the etiology of the domain itself." Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism
Hallaq argues that Orientalism is not an anomaly within Western intellectual life but a perfectly logical extension of it. Once the Enlightenment stripped the world of spiritual essence and reduced everything to objects available for rational analysis, the objectification of entire human civilizations was inevitable. Orientalism is simply the scientific method applied to peoples studying them as specimens, devoid of spirit, reducible to categories and data points.
Said's critique, for all its rhetorical power, operated entirely within the central domain it claimed to challenge. He used the tools of secular humanism and literary criticism themselves products of the same Enlightenment paradigm to attack Orientalism. This is what Hallaq means by saying Said's dissent was "within accepted parameters." He could identify misrepresentation but could not offer a way out, because his own framework was incapable of generating alternatives. The result is a perpetual cycle of identifying victim and perpetrator with no resolution.
The real disease is the metaphysical reorientation that preceded colonialism: the European subject had to be colonized first. The displacement of God, the elevation of philosophical naturalism, the separation of fact from value these internal transformations of European thought created the conditions under which domination, exploitation, and the objectification of entire civilizations became not just possible but rational. Orientalism was downstream of all this.
Takeaway: Critiquing Orientalism with Enlightenment tools is like asking the disease to diagnose itself the real problem is the metaphysical worldview that made objectification of peoples seem natural.
See also: The West Misreads Islam Through Its Own Categories | Modernity Replaced God With the Human Subject | The Crisis of Islamic Civilization Is a Crisis of Modernity