Al-Tahtawi depicted Sudanese as subhuman beasts and stones in his exile qasida.
Evidence
As he described it, half of its inhabitants were like beasts and others like stones.The men of the Sudan forced their women into pros- titution, and they accepted the progeny of these unions, despite the prohi- bition of Islamic law. They taught the women to fornicate like beasts. 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 black- ness—sawädan fï sawädin fï sawädin. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 242
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The ‘blacker and blacker’ refrain parallels the same color-hierarchy tropes found in European orientalist writing; compares to how Egyptian intellectuals adopted racialized discourse from Europe.
Related
- Al-Tahtawi portrayed Sudanese as racially inferior, beast-like, and blackened (similarity 0.92)
- Al-Tahtawi’s exile poem racialized Sudanese as blackness layered upon blackness. (similarity 0.91)
- Al-Tahtawï’s exile poetry racialized Sudanese as sub-human and blackness as degradation (similarity 0.89)
- Slave-descended Sudanese were deemed too lowly to speak for the nation (similarity 0.80)
- Egyptian writers ranked Sudanese tribes on a racial scale of savagery. (similarity 0.79)
- Egyptian racial constructions of blackness hardened mid-century. (similarity 0.78)