Interpretation or mis-reading?

I am puzzling over the line between re-interpretation and mis-reading/mis-understanding. On what does the decision that something is a re-interpretation, a positive intellectual enterprise, and not a mis-reading/mis-understanding, a negative intellectual enterprise, rest? What power structures are at play in these decisions?

Dabashi:

“It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that audacity to think yourself the agent of history that enables a thinker to think his particular thinking is 'Thinking' in universal terms, and his philosophy 'Philosophy' and his city square 'The Public Space', and thus he a globally recognised Public Intellectual.
There is thus a direct and unmitigated structural link between an empire, or an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire.”

This passage comes after he comments on Gramsi mis-quoting Kant. (Gramsci: “Kant's maxim 'Act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions.'”) Although this idea of mis-quoting is pertinent to my reflections , I do not want to deal directly with Gramsci and Kant, instead I want to focus on Dabashi's comment about the audacity of thinking your “particular thinking is 'Thinking' in universal terms.” How is this audacity related to the line that is drawn between positive re-interpretation and negative mis-reading?

Hogan:

“As is well known, the Arab theorists simply misunderstood Aristotle on a number of points, due primarily to inadequate translations and to the different literary traditions of Greece and the Arab world. However, what is not well known is that they developed a subtle and illuminating analysis of the ethical import of literature, in many ways anticipating Romantic developments in Europe eight centuries later.” (p.4)

None of the “Arab theorists” he mentions (Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and al-Farabi) were actually Arab, but that oversight aside, does this comment not fall into the trap of Dabashi's audacity of thinking? The theorists “simply misunderstood” Aristotle, but that is okay because they anticipated the Romantics. Why is it so important to emphasize misunderstanding instead of describing it as a “unique interpretation”? For the purposes of the article why mention it at all? (Not to mention the fact that some of the Romantics were influenced by Arabic and Persian literature.)

I want to end with a passage from Said's Orientalism:

“...but the rules of the logic by which a green fern in one society is a symbol of grace and in another is considered maleficent are neither predictably rational or universal. There is always a measure of the purely arbitrary in the way the distinctions between things are seen. And with these distinctions go values whose history, if one could unearth it completely, would probably show the same measure of arbitrariness.” (53-4)

Obvious green ferns and interpretation/misunderstanding are very different things, but I think this passage is relevant to the questions I have been raising and the other passages I have highlighted. We are again brought back to the question of the audacity of thinking my particular thought is of a universal nature. To conclude these thoughts I will re-iterate one of the questions I raised at the beginning of this post: What power structures are at play when distinguishing between re-interpretation and mis-reading/mis-understanding? How do we deal with these power structures if we want claim that something is not a mis-reading/mis-understanding, that it deserves to be analyzed as more than that?