Said accuses the academic discipline of orientalism of perpetuating negative racial stereotypes, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice, and the myth of an unchanging, essential "Orient". He misrepresents distinguished scholars such as Richard Southern and Raymond Schwab. But he also accuses orientalists as a group of complicity with imperial power. The orientalists are said to have created the "Other" - the non-European always characterised in a negative way as passive, weak, in need of civilising by the more advanced West.

But there is a contradiction in Said's major thesis. If orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs and Arabic society, then how could this -pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe? If imperialism was based on "information and control", how could false information enable the West to control the Orient?

To argue his case, Said conveniently leaves out the important contribution of German orientalists. Their inclusion would destroy the central thesis of Orientalism: that all orientalists produced knowledge, which generated power, and that they colluded with imperialists to dominate the Orient. During the age of imperialism, Germans were the greatest of all scholars of the Orient, but Germany was never an imperial power in North Africa or the Middle East.

The most pernicious legacy of Said's Orientalism is its cult of Muslim victimhood, which lent implicit support to Islamic fundamentalism - even though Said's background was Christian. As Nadim Al-Bitar, an Arab critic, has said, for Said "all the ills [of the Arab world] emanate from orientalism and have nothing to do with the socio-economic, political and ideological makeup of the Arab lands or with the cultural and historical backwardness which stands behind it."

Edward Said has much to answer for.