Orientalism

Said argued in 1978 that the Western academic study of the Arab world — its literature, its history, its people — was not objective scholarship but a system of representation designed to justify colonial domination. The Orient was not discovered but invented: a projection of Western fantasies about the exotic, the backward, the dangerous. Once you see the framework he's describing, you cannot unsee it — in journalism, in policy, in fiction, in the language politicians use when they talk about the Middle East. The most important critical text written about how the West sees the Arab world and why that seeing is always also a form of control.