A book defining eight modern political words appeared amid Egypt’s 1881 nationalist uprising

Evidence

In October 1881, a month after the nationalist leader Ahmad Urabi had lined up his troops in front of the Khedival Palace and forced the regime to accept his popular demands, thereby precipitating the British invasion to restore Khedival power, a book had been published in Cairo entitled The Essay on Eight Words (Risalat al-kalim al-thaman). The book discussed the meaning of eight words ‘current on the tongues of the younger generation today’, nation, homeland, government, justice, oppression, politics, liberty and education. It was written by Husayn al-Marsafi, the senior professor at Dar al-Ulum, the école normale set up in Cairo ten years earlier to produce teachers for the new government schools, who was among the most prominent of the established scholars and teachers of his time. Significantly, he was also the mentor of Mahmud Sami Pasha al-Barudi, the officer and poet who was to become Prime Minister the following year of the short-lived nationalist government. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 418

Categorization

• XREF: The practice of defining a fixed lexicon of modern political terms parallels Raymond Williams’s Keywords project.
• SEED: An essay tracing how ‘keywords’ projects — al-Marsafi’s eight words, Williams’s Keywords — surface at moments of political rupture as attempts to stabilize meaning.