To the great modern system for the classification of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as marking the presence of a "reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism." The emergence of this modern classification of cultures does not represent for Said "a sudden access of objective knowledge" but rather "a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism."

DEFINE: Clarifies Said's core thesis that Orientalism is not objective knowledge but a secularized, naturalized heir to religious classification systems.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 393