Both the security state and its opponents mobilize scholarship for political ends

Evidence

To say, as Lewis and his imitators do, that all such observations are only a matter of espousing “fashionable causes” is not quite to address the question of why, for example, so many Islamic specialists were and still are routinely consulted by, and actively work for, governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination, or outright aggression, or why so many scholars of Islam—like Lewis himself—voluntarily feel that it is part of their duty to mount attacks on modern Arab or Islamic peoples with the pretense that “classical” Islamic culture can nevertheless be the object of disinterested scholarly concern. The spectacle of specialists in the history of medieval Islamic guilds being sent on State Department missions to brief area embassies on United States security interests in the Persian Gulf does not spontaneously suggest anything resembling the love of Hellas ascribed by Lewis to the supposedly cognate field of classical philology. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 865 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The closeness between politics and Orientalism, or to put it more circumspectly, the great likelihood that ideas about the Orient drawn from Orientalism can be put to political use, is an important yet extremely sensitive truth. It raises questions about the predisposition towards innocence or guilt, scholarly disinterest or pressure-group complicity, in such fields as black or women’s studies. It necessarily provokes unrest in one’s conscience about cultural, racial, or historical generalizations, their uses, value, degree of objectivity, and fundamental intent. More than anything else, the political and cultural circumstances in which Western Orientalism has flourished draw attention to the debased position of the Orient or Oriental as an object of study. Can any other than a political master-slave relation produce the Orientalized Orient perfectly characterized by Anwar Abdel Malek? — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 267 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Islamic scholarship functions as an arm of state power, not disinterested learning — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 865; Ideas about the Orient drawn from scholarship are readily put to political use — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 267; State-allied propagandists and activists jointly policed campus critique of US foreign policy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 666

Broader Connections

• Islamic scholarship functions as an arm of state power, not disinterested learning #exemplifies (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 865
• Ideas about the Orient drawn from scholarship are readily put to political use #corroborates (0.92) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 267