US Middle East expertise is uniquely fused with corporate and government power
Evidence
Similar scholars in the United States are known only as Middle East or Islamic experts; they belong to the class of experts, and their domain, insofar as they are concerned with modern societies in the Islamic world, can be regarded as the intellectual equivalent of crisis management. … During their many decades of administering Islamic colonies, both Britain and France naturally produced a class of colonial experts, but this class did not in turn produce an adjunct to it equivalent to the network of the Middle East studies-government-corporate alliance that exists in the United States. Professors of Arabic or Persian or Islamic institutions did their work in British and French universities; they were called on for advice and even participation by the colonial departments and by private business enterprises; they occasionally held congresses; but they do not seem to have created an independent structure of their own, sustained and even maintained by the private business sector or directly by foundations and the government. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 332
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: reframe the common narrative that US ‘neutral experts’ replaced colonialist Orientalists — Said’s point is the US built a far more institutionalized power-scholarship complex than the colonial empires ever did.