Al-Tahtawï’s exile poetry racialized Sudanese as sub-human and blackness as degradation

Evidence

Al-Tahtawï, while still suffering exile in the Sudan, had intended to send his lament in the form of a qasïda (a rhymed praise poem) to the katkhuda of Egypt, Hassan Pasha. … As he described it, half of its inhabitants were like beasts and others like stones.The men of the Sudan forced their women into prostitution, and they accepted the progeny of these unions, despite the prohibition of Islamic law. … If it had not been for the white Arabs—law la al-bayda min al-`arab la känu— they would have been blacker and blacker and blacker, nothing but blackness—sawädan fï sawädin fï sawädin. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 242

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘internal orientalism’ of Egyptian intellectuals toward Sudan as a mirror of how colonized peoples internalize civilizational hierarchies and project them southward.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s wider African coloniality framework: racial hierarchy within the ‘colonized’ world, paralleling settler-colonial vs. racialized labor distinctions elsewhere in Africa.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did al-Tahtawï’s anti-Sudanese racism contradict or coexist with his Egypt-centric modernizing project — and does Manähij function as proto-Saidian orientalism aimed at Africa’s own south?