Guénon saw Western knowledge-conversion, not mere conquest, as the distinctive colonial abuse.

Evidence

The difference amounts to “abuse,” one whose “chief object … is to exploit the country, and … its inhabitants.” This in effect is compounding the economic abuse of the colonized by an attitudinal sense of superiority that invariably involves treating even “civilized peoples” like “savages.” Not just the colonists and state officials but also “Europeans almost without exception” “went out to seek the Easterners, not to learn from them, as behooves youth in the presence of old men, but to strive, by brutal or insidious means, to convert them to their own way of thinking” through exporting schools and a Western system of education and through “assimilation.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the distinction between economic exploitation and epistemic imposition — connects to broader colonial theory literature (Césaire, first sentence of Discourse on Colonialism).