Orientalism differed from Muslim self-construction in its teleology of the subject

Evidence

The Orientalist project, on the other hand, though similar in some ways, was yet profoundly different in others. The subject matter of Orientalism, always the object, was by definition not European, although the enterprise itself was conducted by Europeans for Europeans, and mostly for the exercise of their sovereign domination over the Orient. An instrumental building block of colonialism, the enterprise was an essential part of constructing modernity that initially—but undoubtedly—reconstituted the life values and worldview of Europeans. They came to inhabit that modernity, the only world they recognized as having full and autonomous ontological, epistemological, and cultural status, and thus legitimacy. The essential difference between the two projects thus pertained not to the processes of constructing the cultural or psychological self (however different these were in each case), but rather to the teleology of humanity and of the subject, and their place in the world. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 454