Late-nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars were politically bound to colonial administrations

Evidence

What Waardenburg does not stress enough is that most of the late-nineteenth-century Orientalists were bound to each other politically as well. Snouck Hurgronje went directly from his studies of Islam to being an adviser to the Dutch government on handling its Muslim Indonesian colonies; Macdonald and Massignon were widely sought after as experts on Islamic matters by colonial administrators from North Africa to Pakistan; and, as Waardenburg says (all too briefly) at one point, all five scholars shaped a coherent vision of Islam that had a wide influence on government circles throughout the Western world. What we must add to Waardenburg’s observation is that these scholars were completing, bringing to an ultimate concrete refinement, the tendency since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to treat the Orient not only as a vague literary problem but—according to Masson-Oursel—as “un ferme propos d’assimiler adéquatement la valeur des langues pour pénétrer les moeurs et les pensées, pour forcer même des secrets de l’histoire.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 521

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the Islamophobia field’s claim that expert knowledge of Islam was infrastructural to colonial governance.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing further: the specific career-to-policy pipeline of Snouck Hurgronje as a model case of scholarly-to-colonial conversion.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 521