一些萨义德的叙述批评者声称，萨义德没有对像诗人歌德（他从来没有去过东方）以及小说家福楼拜（他只是在埃及做过短暂停留）的作品和严肃的学者比如雷纳恩和雷恩（英语：Edward William Lane）的作品作出区分，后者不仅通晓阿拉伯文，而且写出了很有价值的作品。萨义德认为，这些人的共同的欧洲出身和态度比上面的区分更加根本。[16]包括欧文在内的很多学者指出，萨义德完全忽略了这样的事实，也就是20世纪的东方研究是被像德国和匈牙利这样的，并不占据某个东方帝国的国家的学者所主导的，这对萨义德来说无疑是个难题。[17]这些批评者批评萨义德创造了一个不容异己的“西方主义”来对抗西方学者创造的“东方主义”。他们认为萨义德混淆了浪漫主义与启蒙的不同范例，也就是他忽略了在西方学者中间普遍存在的对东方的态度的争议；他也没有认可很多东方学家，比如琼斯等都对如何建立东西方之间的血缘联系而不是制造双方之间的差异更感兴趣，并且他们在研究过程中的不断，提供了反殖民主义的国家主义的基础。[18]从更普遍的角度讲，批评者认为萨义德和他的追随者们没有区别对待，媒体与流行文化中的东方主义（比如电影《印第安那琼斯与咒语庙》中描述的那样），与西方学者对东方语言、文学、历史和文化的学术研究，后者对流行文化与媒体中的东方主义也是持严厉批评态度的。[19]
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain 汉译《论晚期风格：反常合道的音乐与文学》（麦田，2010）
Covering Islam:How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World汉译《遮蔽的伊斯兰（英语：Covering Islam）：西方媒体眼下的穆斯林世界》（立绪，2002）、《报道伊斯兰》（上海译文，2009）
Culture and Resistance： Conversations With Edward W. Said汉译《文化与抵抗：“巴勒斯坦之音”的绝响》（立绪，2004）、《文化与抵抗︰萨义德访谈录》（上海译文，2009）
Reflections on Exile and Other literary and Cultural Essays汉译《来自第三世界的痛苦报道：爱德华·萨义德文化随笔集》（上海译文，2013）
Ernest Gellner, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism", rev. of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement February 19, 1993: 3-4.
Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", in Islam and the West (London 1993) 99–118; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2003; London: Allen Lane, 2006.
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Natures, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); Malcolm Kerr, rev. of Orientalism （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）, by Edward Said, International Jour. of Middle Eastern Studies 12 (Dec. 1980): 544-47; and Martin Kramer（英语：Martin Kramer）, "Said’s Splash" （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Policy Papers 58 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). ISBN 978-0-944029-49-7. Kramer observes in "Said's Splash" that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie (whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam) allowed that the book was 'important and in many ways positive.' But she also thought it had had 'unfortunate consequences'"; in an interview published in Approaches to the History of the Middle East, ed. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (London: Ithaca Press, 1994) 144-45, as cited & qtd. by Kramer, Keddie says:
"I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative." It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan."
D.A. Washbrook, "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", in Historiography, vol. 5 of The Oxford History of the British Empire 607.
Terry Eagleton, "In the Gaudy Supermarket" (Review of A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), London Review of Books. [1] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32.2 (1990): 383-408.
Andrew N. Rubin, "Techniques of Trouble: Edward Saïd and the Dialectics of Cultural Philology", The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.4 (2003). pp. 862–76.
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