I would also point you towards Bernard Lewis's critique. Lewis was a major target of the original book and I think that it is fair to say he and Said were nemeses.
https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/307584/original/The+Question+of+Orientalism+by+Bernard+Lewis+%7C+The+New+York+Review+of+Books.pdfThe essential point that Lewis makes is that Said cherry picks authors to make the rise of Orientalism seem to coincide with colonialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century except that the authors he cites are arbitrarily only from Britain and France and ignores, explicitly, the scholars in very similar lines of thought from places that did not colonize the Middle East (again, Said largely ignores the rest of the East). He also ignores early research into the Orient. Seventeenth century scholarship is rather plentiful about the East at a time when no Western power had any aspiration or ability to conquer the Middle East.
Said attempts to tie intellectual developments to imperialism through a number of dishonest and dubious means. It is worth reading the article in its entirety if you have time.