No society in that region was ever wholly erased before European colonialism.

Evidence

If Ottoman society, like many “Oriental” others, meant anything, it was not for its political forms, but rather for its distinctive institutions, its social practices, a unique educational “system,” its moral-mystical modes of expressing the self, its particular ways of existing in the natural and cosmological world, and an overall system of value that was as robust and as sustainable as any other, for the sustainability had been a gradually adjusting continuation of earlier forms of existence that stretched back to ancient Babylonia and the world that surrounded it. Never has there been a single instance in the entire history of that region of the world—and I suspect elsewhere as well—where a society, small or large, was structurally transformed from within the subject outward, leading to the totalistic erasure of a mode of existence out of the world. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 428

Categorization

• QUESTION: The author hedges with ‘I suspect elsewhere as well’ — worth chasing whether any non-colonial case of totalistic erasure exists.