Military weakness forced colonial rulers to co-opt local religious elites for rule.

Evidence

When it seemed obvious to Napoleon that his force was too small to impose itself on the Egyptians, he then tried to make the local imams, cadis, muftis, and ulemas interpret the Koran in favor of the Grande Armée. To this end, the sixty ulemas who taught at the Azhar were invited to his quarters, given full military honors, and then allowed to be flattered by Napoleon’s admiration for Islam and Mohammed and by his obvious veneration for the Koran, with which he seemed perfectly familiar. This worked, and soon the population of Cairo seemed to have lost its distrust of the occupiers. Napoleon later gave his deputy Kleber strict instructions after he left always to administer Egypt through the Orientalists and the religious Islamic leaders whom they could win over; any other politics was too expensive and foolish. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the mechanism whereby Orientalist knowledge becomes an administration tool in the colonies — central to the ‘scaffolding theory’ vocabulary being built.
• XREF: The co-optation of religious authority to legitimate rule resonates with Gramscian hegemony — rule through consent manufactured by winning over indigenous intermediaries rather than pure coercion — which later Islamophobia readings assume.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209