Orientalist scholarship supplied the knowledge base that justified colonial rule

Evidence

Although the connection between a routine British classical education and the extension of the British empire is more complex than Lewis might suppose, no more glaring parallel exists between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism. Much of the information and knowledge about Islam and the Orient that was used by the colonial powers to justify their colonialism derived from Orientalist scholarship: a recent study by many contributors, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, edited by Carl A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer, demonstrates with copious documentation how Orientalist knowledge was used in the colonial administration of South Asia. A fairly consistent interchange still continues between area scholars, such as Orientalists, and government departments of foreign affairs. In addition, many of the stereotypes of Islamic and Arabic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation, and splendor to be found in writers from John Buchan to V.S. Naipaul have also been presuppositions underlying the adjoining field of academic Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 864

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings this book was chosen to support — the claim that expert knowledge-systems enable colonial/state domination is the key mechanism the reader needs to carry forward. — connects to: Institutional Orientalism, not all Orientalist scholarship, served colonial power
• SEED: The ongoing interchange between area scholars and government departments of foreign affairs is a live, current angle for an essay on think-tank/academia complicity in contemporary foreign policy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 864