Ideas about the Orient drawn from scholarship are readily put to political use

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: The master-slave relational framing anticipates the colonial psychology readings in the Islamophobia module; the extension to black and women’s studies parallels related critical traditions. — connects to: Both the security state and its opponents mobilize scholarship for political ends
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 267