Western culture responded to the Orient as existential other. As if following McLuhan's reading of the Narcissus myth, Said's book describes the way Orientalists amputated themselves from the Oriental side of the world, even if they fell in love with it.
Orientalists took it for granted that they stood at a normal viewpoint when regarding what they saw as an abnormal orient. In the context of their own time and culture they were unable to overcome the effects of imperialism and racism on their analyses.
Said says: "Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West."114 Furthermore, the works of the Orientalists were validated by their usefulness to conquering generals, colonial administrators, and mercantile trade.
A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual...is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.115
And many Oriental peoples found themselves responding in stereotypical ways when under the control of Occidental administrators. This had a tendency to reinforce Orientalist assumptions.116 Because it was a tool of ownership and control, the scholarship of Orientalism tended to be self-proving.
"At the outset one can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual."117
When Sanskrit writing was discovered to predate Hebrew the superior stance taken by Christendom had to be shored up with stern prescriptions against Oriental scholarship.118 Western accounts of the Islamic tradition were for many years distorted to give the impression that Mohammed was a diabolical misrepresentation of the role of Christ in Christianity.119
When Napoleon prepared for the invasion of Egypt he studied every available text by the French Orientalists120 and then, realising that the Grande Armeé was too small for the job, he had his scholars persuade the Egyptian Muslims that "Nous sommes les vrais muselmans." In this way he took control of his own piece of the Orient and effectively rewrote its content before opening it up to European scrutiny as a department of French learning.121 Despite its ultimate failure, Said says Napoleon's occupation of Egypt gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient.122