Thank you Gigi, I really appreciate it.

I have read Said's Orientalism and, interestingly enough, it all comes back to Nietsche. Said used Foucault's concept of a 'discourse' which was influenced by Nietzsche's concept of the 'Will to Power'. The idea is that knowledge and power are intimately connected. In regard to the study of the orient, this meant that the West's understanding of the East was always predicated on these power-relations, which limited its understanding: 'Orientalism is a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought'. It said more about the West than it did about its topic: 'Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it'.

You're right to bring up Said in regard to what Nietzsche said about Islam. In many ways, his view of Islam says more about him and his beliefs than it does about anything Islamic.