Professional Middle East studies scholarship endorsed rather than challenged crude anti-Arab ideas

Evidence

These crude ideas are supported, not contradicted, by the academic whose business is the study of the Arab Near East. (It is worth noting incidentally that the Princeton event I referred to above took place in a university that prides itself on its department of Near Eastern Studies founded in 1927, the oldest such department in the country.) Take as an instance the report produced in 1967 by Morroe Berger, a professor of sociology and Near Eastern studies at Princeton, at the behest of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; he was then president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional association of scholars concerned with all aspects of the Near East, “primarily since the rise of Islam and from the viewpoint of the social science and humanistic disciplines,” and founded in 1967. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 731

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit concept of how academic institutions legitimate exclusionary representations — relevant to later Islamophobia readings on institutional complicity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 731