Orientalism is not "talking about Muslims", it's a specific sort of juxtaposition between a strong virile West and a decadent exoticized feminine East. If anything Dune is Occidentalist. Literally nobody reads theory anymore:

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So Said's case is that Orientalism is a distinct 19th/20th century phenomenon, growing out of the European "rediscovery" of the Middle East following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. "The decadent east" is older than that, of course! But "Orientalism" isn't.

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For instance, Said notes that one of the key drivers of 19th century Orientalism was that Europeans actually "knew Oriental history better than the Orientals themselves" - it was Europeans who deciphered hieroglyphics and cuneiform while those scripts were lost to Arabs, Egyptians, and Persians.

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I have some bad news about the median sentence served by Nazis convicted of war crimes.

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unintentionally very funny sentence at the end of this paragraph in A Fire Upon the Deep

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