Colonial power decides the object of knowledge has no complexity beyond the colonizer’s mind.

Evidence

The justification for the creation of such an alien system within Islamic and Hindu juridico-moral systems rested on the claim that these “laws” were arbitrary, inconsistent, and disorderly, and only through the recovery of the great texts of the tradition could the country be brought back to its former glory. Sovereign domination did not allow for the possibility, in reality the only one, that Hastings and Jones did not understand or did not want to understand what they were dealing with and that they needed better education before they declared their audacious plans, or that they did understand but their understanding was irrelevant and thus set aside without a second thought. If sovereign domination can decide that the object of knowledge possesses no complexity beyond the mind of the subject, its subset, then sovereign knowledge can decide that the exception is indeed the rule. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 260

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing syllogism — sovereign domination licenses sovereign knowledge to declare the exception the rule — is a dense, paradigm-shifting account of how epistemic violence and political power interlock. Resists one-sentence summary.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that understanding was ‘irrelevant and set aside’ — this reframes the ‘didn’t understand’ debate into a stronger claim that comprehension simply never mattered to colonial administration.