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.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's broader thesis in Orientalism about how the West constructed the East as a fixed, unchanging object of study.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 41