Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern world, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.

Examples used in the book include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad,[verification needed] which conflates a people, a time, and a place into one narrative of an incident and adventure in an exotic land.

As such, Orientalism is the pivotal source of the inaccurate cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world, specifically in relation to the Middle East region.

Said's work drew attention to the obsession of Western writers with women and their role in the preservation (or destruction) of so-called cultural mores, viewing them as either "pristine" (redeemed) or "contaminated" (fallen).

He argued that "Orientalism is not a mere political subject or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions," but rather "a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.

Therefore, Orientalism was a method of practical and cultural discrimination that was applied to non-European societies and peoples in order to establish European imperial domination.

The history of European colonial rule and political domination of Eastern civilizations distorts the intellectual objectivity of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalist; thus did the term "Orientalism" become a pejorative word regarding non–Western peoples and cultures:[16] I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies.

[6]: 11 The notion of cultural representations as a means for domination and control would remain a central feature of Said's critical approach proposed in Orientalism.

The Western world had been surprised, by the pro-active and decisive actions of non-Western peoples, whom the ideology of Orientalism had defined as essentially weak societies and impotent countries.

The geopolitical reality of their actions, of military and economic warfare, voided the fictional nature of Orientalist representations, attitudes, and opinions about the non-Western Other self.

Edward Said's method of post-structuralist analysis derived from the analytic techniques of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; and the perspectives to Orientalism presented by Abdul Latif Tibawi,[19] Anouar Abdel-Malek,[20] Maxime Rodinson,[21] and Richard William Southern.

(1988) also became a foundational text of postcolonial culture studies;[26] Homi K. Bhabha (Nation and Narration, 1990);[27] Ronald Inden (Imagining India, 1990);[28] Gyan Prakash ("Writing Post–Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography", 1990);[29] Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001);[30] and Hamid Dabashi (Iran: A People Interrupted, 2007).

of the nature of the post-colonial world, the peoples, and their discontents;[31][32] which verify the efficacy of the critical method applied in Orientalism (1978), especially in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

[34] Anthropologist Talal Asad said that the book Orientalism is: not only a catalogue of Western prejudices about and misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims ... [but an investigation and analysis of the] authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse—the closed, self-evident, self-confirming character of that distinctive discourse, which is reproduced, again and again, through scholarly texts, travelogues, literary works of imagination, and the obiter dicta of public men-of-affairs.

That overcoming such intellectual malaise requires that area scholars choose to break their "mind-forg'd manacles" and deeply reflect upon the basic cultural assumptions of their area-studies scholarship.

[40][41][42] In a review of a book by Ibn Warraq, American classicist Bruce Thornton dismissed Orientalism as an "incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt".

[43] Likewise, in the preface paragraphs of a book-review article "Enough Said" (2007), about Dangerous Knowledge (2007), which is the American title for British-published For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies by Robert Irwin, Martin Kramer criticized what he said was the way Said turned the term "Orientalism" into a pejorative, saying "In a semantic sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term "Orientalism", as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby, neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists.

He listed certain factual and editing errors, and noted a number of prominent Orientalists were left unmentioned, but says that he believes it to be "the most complete account of Orientalism from the emergence of its modern version in the 19th century to the present day."

"[52] American scholar of religion Jason Ānanda Josephson has argued that data from Japan complicates Said's thesis about Orientalism as a field linked to imperial power.

[56]In the article, "Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy" (2008), Robert Irwin says that Said ineffectively distinguished among writers of different centuries and genres of Orientalist literature.

That the disparate examples, such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) who never travelled to the Orient; the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) who briefly toured Egypt; the French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823–1892), whose anti-Semitism voided his work; and the British Arabist Edward William Lane (1801–1876), who compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93)—did not constitute a comprehensive scope of investigation or critical comparison.

[58] In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past (1988), O. P. Kejariwal says that with the creation of a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the Orientalism of Western discourse with the Eastern world, Said had failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and ignored the differences among Orientalists; and that he failed to acknowledge the positive contributions of Orientalists who sought kinship between the East and the West, rather than to create an artificial "difference" of cultural inferiority and superiority; such a man was William Jones (1746–1794), the British philologist–lexicographer who proposed that Indo–European languages are interrelated.

Just over ten years later Ahmad raised two criticisms of Said's assertions: firstly, that according to Said orientalist views were so pervasive that he did not differentiate critics of colonialism such as Karl Marx from supporters of imperialism, despite the role of Marxists in anti-colonial struggles across the world, and secondly that Said's suggestion of cultural causes for imperialism displaced older Marxist, nationalist and liberal analyses based on the interests of economic classes, nations and individuals in favour of a "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.

[62] More recently, Chibber has pointed out that essentialist and ethnocentric portrayals of foreign cultures can be found in pre-colonial Eastern civilisations as well: whilst Said acknowledged that "all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality", Chibber has argued that this fact weakens the contention that such essentialism was itself a cause of colonialism, since the latter was practiced by a relatively small number of mostly Western European countries.

(1999) Biswamoy Pati said that in making ethnicity and cultural background the tests of moral authority and intellectual objectivity in studying the Oriental world, Said drew attention to his personal identity as a Palestinian and as a subaltern of the British Empire, in the Near East.

[6]: 347 [65] In the article "Orientalism Now" (1995), historian Gyan Prakash says that Edward Said had explored fields of Orientalism already surveyed by his predecessors and contemporaries, such as V. G. Kiernan, Bernard S. Cohn, and Anwar Abdel Malek, who also had studied, reported, and interpreted the social relationship that makes the practice of imperialism intellectually, psychologically, and ethically feasible; that is, the relationship between European imperial rule and European representations of the non-European Other self, the colonised people.