Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge

Evidence

Yet what is missing in the book is some sense of the political as well as ideological edge given the Oriental material by the British and French writers I am principally concerned with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate subsequent developments in academic as well as literary Orientalism that bear on the connection between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded imperialism on the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these earlier matters are reproduced more or less in American Orientalism after the Second World War. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Core scaffolding claim for the Islamophobia readings: knowledge-production is political and ideological, not neutral — the exact move the field later applies to discourse about Muslims. — connects to: Orientalist scholarship was internally divided between empire servants and anti-colonial critics; Postwar postcolonial critiques transformed Orientalism’s meaning from scholarship into ideology of empire; Neocons deliberately leveraged academic Orientalist authority to sanction their wars (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 82