There was a good Monday Methods thread addressing Said and Orientalism a while back. The intro by u/commiespaceinvader does an excellent job of summarizing the problems with Orientalism:

“The essence of Said's argument in Orientalism is that the representation of "the Orient" in Western art, culture, and academia – the Western knowledge of the Eastern world – is not based upon an objective exercise of intellectual inquiry but upon a fictional depiction in the form of an intellectual exercise in self-affirmation. It is a system of thought that in the words of Said "approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing no less enduring Western essence".”