Islamic states only authorized learning from Europe to better fight it.

Evidence

The question of travel for study did not arise, since clearly there was nothing to be learnt from the benighted infidels of the outer wilderness. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the Pasha of Egypt, followed by the Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia, sent the first student missions to Europe. Their main pur­ pose in sending these missions was the modernization of their armed forces, and their action could therefore be justified by the ruling of earlier jurists that it is per­ missible to learn from the enemy in order more effectively to fight him. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 703

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors and inverts the familiar Orientalism dynamic — here the Muslim world’s first systematic knowledge imports were instrumentally justified against the Christian enemy, a useful asymmetry against one-way ‘learning from the West’ narratives.
• QUESTION: By what routes did the ‘learn from the enemy to fight him’ ruling get extended once the modernizing missions returned bearing European military-administrative models? The extension mechanism itself is left implicit.