Orientalism became a managerial code through which Europe interpreted itself.

Evidence

Their background is the transformation of the exacting, professional science of Orientalism, whose function in nineteenth-century culture had been the restoration to Europe of a lost portion of humanity, but which had become in the twentieth century both an instrument of policy and, more important, a code by which Europe could interpret both itself and the Orient to itself. … My point is that the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission—all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness. In fact, what took place was the very opposite of liberal: the hardening of doctrine and meaning, imparted by “science,” into “truth.” For if such truth reserved for itself the right to judge the Orient as immutably Oriental in the ways I have indicated, then liberality was no more than a form of oppression and mentalistic prejudice. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 652

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the twentieth-century transformation of Orientalism from philological subspecialty into a code for self-interpretation and political management.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ‘expertise’ about Muslims functions as a self-serving interpretive code rather than neutral knowledge. — connects to: Orientalism was first applied internally to Europe’s own poor and aristocracy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 136; Orientalist binaries were first aimed at Europe’s own poor and aristocracy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 148
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 652