From Refashioning Iran, p20:
The modular histories of Orientalism grounded exclusively in a European context the intellectual contributions of Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and other “pioneering” Orientalists. This historiographical selection played a strategic role in constituting “the West” as the site of innovation and “the Orient” as the locus of tradition. The fully differentiated East and West were the historical products of these paradigmatic selections and deletions.
But, in its formative phase, Orientalism was a product of cultural and intellectual hybridization. Its development into “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident” was a later development. Orientalism’s transformation into a discourse on Western domination was ultimately connected to colonization and obliteration of all traces of “Oriental” agency, subjectivity, voice, writing and creativity.
And scholarship, as we shall see.