European conquest imposed European ways of classifying the world on Muslim observers.

Evidence

With European dominance came European perceptions and classifications. Sheikh Rifa¯ a Ra¯fi al-Tfi ahtfia¯wi, an Egyptian from Al-Azhar University, who stayed in Paris from 1826–31 as religious preceptor to the Egyptian Student Mission, wrote the first influential Arabic account of a European country: “You should know,” he tells his readers, “that the geographers of the Franks have divided the world, from north to south and from east to west, into five parts, which are the lands of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the surrounding Ocean.” He then goes on to describe the physical and political geography of Europe, as a preliminary to his discussion and explanation of the governments and laws, the manners and customs, of the French. This was the beginning of what became an extensive literature, both original and translated, in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages, informing Muslim readers and students about the new, challenging, and menacing power of Europe. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 684

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the classic Said direction: here it is the Muslim world learning European classification (the five ‘Frankish’ continents initially strike an Al-Azhar sheikh as alien geography) — a useful qualification to knowledge-production cluster assumptions.
• SEED: Angle: epistemic reversal — European world-division (five continents) as itself an imposed classification that Muslims had to learn, complementing standard Islamic-vis-à-vis-Europe narratives.
• QUESTION: Would be worth chasing whether al-Tahtawi’s early text was received as Menacing novelty — was the five-continent scheme actually unfamiliar to educated Muslims, or rhetorical?