Said, a professor at Columbia University, studies the flaw in the perspective of the "Orient" by the "Occident" in his essay, Orientalism. Within the book, Said refers to the "Orient" as the Asiatic regions east of Europe - specifically the Muslim Orient - such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, India, China, and Japan (1-2). By "Occident", Said refers to those of Britain, France, and recently the United States - the West (11). As an academic scholar born in the Orient regions, Said noticed a constant superiority factor within the general discourse of the West upon the East. This sense of dominance was to be found in works of Orientalism - the works of literary writers and of academic research based on scholars who study the Orient. Marginalized as the "Other" and constantly differentiated by those of the West, Said was fuelled to raise awareness of this misconception and thus published Orientalism, an analysis from the "Other" Perspective. Said mainly argues that the study of Orientalism is inevitably jaded by Western ideologies and not only corrupts the image of the Orient but allows the West to gain superiority through obtaining knowledge of them and undermining cultural distinctions. Within the scope of Orientalism Said recognized the de-humanization of the Orient through textualization, the de-civilization through sexual misinterpretations, and misrepresentation of the Orient in everyday media, depicting their agentless cultures. .
The initial act of the West differentiating the East from "us" and "them" (45) set off the process of de-humanizing the Orient. Said analyzes how this dichotomous act activates the imagination of the unknown. Thus, the unknown knowledge of "them" becomes either romanticized or distorted inaccurately. Said acknowledges that, "all kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one's own" (54). When these thoughts of fiction or irrational assumptions became published into texts, the Orient were placed at a lower level in several different ways.
