A Victorian self-improvement tract shaped Egyptian nationalist education.

Evidence

Several events indicate the impact of Smiles’ book in Egypt. In 1886 a Self-Help Society was founded in Alexandria. In 1898 Mustafa Kamil, the young leader of the nationalist opposition to the British occupation, founded a private school – an act which he declared to be his own practical application of the doctrine of self-help. The phrase ‘self-help’ was inscribed on the wall of the school, together with several other mottoes from Smiles’ book. Mustafa Kamil’s patron, the Khedive, is said to have gone even further and had the words of Samuel Smiles written up on the walls of his own palace. Two years after founding his school as an act of self-help, Mustafa Kamil became the first person to call publicly for the founding of a university in Egypt, criticising as he did so the habit among Egyptians of relying upon the government rather than themselves in their affairs. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 354

Categorization

• SEED: The colonial irony: Egyptian nationalists adopted the colonizer’s self-help rhetoric as resistance — a rich essay on how colonized elites internalize and redeploy the master’s ideological tools.
• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s argument about colonized intellectuals internalizing the colonizer’s categories, and to the broader thesis of Mitchell’s book about the colonial ‘world-as-exhibition’.