Jabarti read French grammatical errors as evidence of political deceit

Evidence

Jabarti’s response to this strange innovation, in a chronicle written in the midst of the crisis, was an interesting one. He began his account by copying the text of the proclamation, and followed it for several pages with a detailed list of its grammatical errors. Phrase by phrase he pointed out the colloquialisms, misspellings, ellipses, inconsistencies, morphological inaccuracies and errors of syntax of the French Orientalists, drawing from these incorrect usages a picture of the corruptions, deceptions, misunderstandings and ignorance of the French authorities. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 423

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to how colonized intellectuals read surface formalities (grammar, dress, ritual) as moral-political indexes — parallels the immodesty-moral-panic article’s logic of reading surface style as deep signal.
• QUESTION: Is Jabarti’s grammatical critique a form of resistance-by-refusal-to-engage, or evidence that he genuinely lacked hermeneutic tools for the new medium — or both?