Al-Nadim anxiously inverted the social order as a female black slave displacing male authority

Evidence

These are men of substance, of education (as al-Nadïm’s literary references make clear), who must not shirk the responsibility of sharing their knowledge charitably with the rest of Egyptian society. If they fail in this, then even the structure of the family is challenged, with a female black slave in the guise of a man of learning becoming the authoritative figure and deciding the fate of Egyptian children. Things fall apart if the center cannot hold. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 450

Categorization

• XREF: The phrase echoes Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ — though distinct subject, this Egyptian-Sudanese racial anxiety is a mirror of the Igbo novel’s central collapse-of-order theme worth juxtaposing.
• DEEPTHINKING: A colonized Egyptian intellectual reproducing a miniature civilizing-hierarchy against Sudan while Egypt itself is under Ottoman/British yoke — the layering of coloniality within the colonized world resists easy binary summaries.