Regarding :

“Yet there is enough truth in the allegation to wish that Said had lived long enough to do justice to his topic by authoring a work on how Muslims (how to avoid a generalization?) have conceived of the West in partial, schematized, and therefore distorted ways that preclude human engagement. Perhaps that was not his vocation. It would have made his body of work less partial and therefore truer.”

-Ian Buruma and his collegue Margalit attempted to do that and the result was a poor and flawed book.

- Edward Said himself wrote in the Afterword of Orientalism, that the antidote of Orientalism should certainly not be Occidentalism. So he preemped this accusation.

-This other book you would have liked him to write would have been repetitive because Said’s main point was that the “West” and “Islam” are not valid as categories, that they are intellectual constructions. It is therefore obvious that essentialism goes both ways.

- Orientalism (the book) was an “anti-essentialist” manifesto, and therefore was also implicitly a condemnation of Occidentalism.

-It is also worth mentioning that in his articles written in Arabic for Muslim audiences, Said did -very often- warn Muslims against this shematized and distorted view of the West.

This is why he was a moral authority. He did not take the easy way and tell people what they wanted to hear. When he addressed Western audiences, he challenged them about their misconceptions on Islam, and when he addressed Muslims, he condemned their essentialized view of the West. He never engaged in pandering and that’s why he is so missed.