French Orientalist legal scholarship on Islam was produced by colonial administrators

Evidence

French lawyers, jurists, and academicians who knew anything useful about North Africa (and some who knew near to nothing) began to discourse on matters legal and nonlegal in the Muslim tradition. Many of them were colons who were both scholars and civil servants, and who were involved in the colonialist administration. After the middle of the nineteenth century, they began to produce a massive bulk of legal literature about Islamic law in its North African context, especially about the theory and practice of the dominant Maliki school. The literature was to become an integral part of Western scholarship on, and therefore Western knowledge of, Islam. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 236

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘scholar-administrator’ fusion — how colonial legal codes were laundered into ‘Western knowledge of Islam’ — as a case study in knowledge production serving state power.
• XREF: Dovetails with Bernard Cohn’s work on colonial knowledge in India and the idea that academic expertise about a colonized people is inseparable from the administrative apparatus. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”