Colonialist misrepresentation and scholarship operate through the same epistemological structure

Evidence

There are two profound points raised by this category of Orientalists, qualified by the quantifier “some.” First, the charge of “assimilation” in Guénon is pregnant with meaning, for he invariably employs the term in the context of the French Orientalists’ writings on Algeria and its “native” inhabitants, as well as of the French colonialist and home-government policies in absorbing the country into France. Although not involved in a formal colonialist setting, and no colony in particular is on their mind, the German Orientalists’ “scholarly” act nonetheless possesses the same structural features, the same frame of mind, and the same epistemological underpinnings. In other words, colonialism or not, ill intentioned or well wishing, the discursive power of the West, philosophical, political, or otherwise, cannot but produce the same effects of distortion and misrepresentation. The association of German scholarship with French colonialist scholarship and policies begins to bestow a dialectical dynamic on the idea of “fitting the West in the East” (as Guénon may have put it), and one that does not stop at the mere production of misrepresentation, a unidirectional trajectory. “Fitting” is not merely misrepresentation that discolors the Western mind; it is a project of assimilation that requires and presupposes the remaking of the “Eastern” subject. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 318

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes Guénon’s ‘assimilation’ from mere misrepresentation, defining it as a project requiring the remaking of the Eastern subject.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”