al-Tahtawï bridged Islamic scholarship and European Enlightenment ideas.

Evidence

In his description of al-Tahtawï’s life, Hourani repeats the word new many times: leaving his home in Tahta, al-Tahtawï “found himself pushed by circumstances from the old world into the new”; at al-Azhär he “had his first glimpse of a new world”; he was the imam of the regiment of “the new Egyptian army,” and “the new army was the nucleus of a new Egypt”; in France he encountered,through the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu,“new ideas” of the nation. Al-Tahtawï thus presented was a man on the cusp of two traditions, well-trained in Islam scholarship and open to the European Enlightenment. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 222

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘liminal position’ figures in other colonial literatures — translators and intermediaries of empire.