Although revered in certain circles as something close to holy
writ, Edward W. Said’s famous 1978 study Orientalism is rife
with contradictions that over the years have become more and
more difficult to ignore. It hops disconcertingly between
Orientalism as an academic pursuit, as a mental attitude and as
a system of colonial oppression. At times it suggests that
Orientalism began in the eighteenth century with the rise of
modern European imperialism; elsewhere it implies that
Orientalism settled like a miasma on the Western mind as far
back as the ancient Greeks. We are left with the impression that
Europe has been unalterably bigoted whenever it has gazed
eastward, although why that is not equally the case whenever it
has looked to the south, the west or, for that matter, the north
is never clarified.  In Said’s hands, Orientalism becomes a
metaphysical force, over and above history, politics and other
such mundane factors–“always and everywhere the same,” as
Valerie Kennedy puts it in her valuable study Ed