A dark-skinned high official’s rank shattered Mubarak’s racial hierarchy assumptions

Evidence

An incident that confronted Alï Mubärak's consciousness of racial differentiation also prodded him to reevaluate his personal ambitions and may have informed how he later identified certain Sudanese attributes with those of pre-Islamic Arabs. The experience of meeting a dark-skinned yet high-ranking functionary shocked the young Alï Mubärak, upsetting his conceptions about the hierarchy of culture and order in Egypt and inspiring his deep wish to profit from the same new educational and bureaucratic order in Egypt, created originally by Muhammad `Alï. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 136

Categorization

• QUESTION: One elite dark-skinned functionary was enough to unsettle an Egyptian intellectual’s presumed racial ordering - suggests how weakly-held the hierarchy was.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 136