Islamic scholarship functions as an arm of state power, not disinterested learning

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

Categorization

• XREF: The disinterested-objectivity pretense concealing political service echoes the later Islamophobia-literature critique that ‘expertise’ on Islam is itself politically positioned. — connects to: Both the security state and its opponents mobilize scholarship for political ends
• SEED: The medieval-guilds-specialist briefing embassies on Gulf security is a vivid, concrete illustration of academic complicity usable as an opener for an essay.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 865