Al-Tunisï’s Sudan account predated and ignored Egypt’s colonial conquest of Sudan

Evidence

Al-Tunisï’s perspective on the Sudan was written through the filter of hindsight.The text of Tashhïdh al-adhhän was not published in Arabic until 1845, several years before the death of Muhammad Alï and forty years after al-Tunisï had completed his travels to Därfür. He dedicated the work to the viceroy, who is also mentioned in appendices attached by al-Tunisï’s French colleague and translator, M. Perron. But even though the narrative was written during Muhammad Alï’s reign, well after the pasha had launched his campaign of expansionism into the Sudan, and even though he was encouraged to set it on paper by a French doctor and scholar who had also journeyed often to the Sudan, al-Tunisï never himself experienced the political changes that the conquest stirred in the Sudan. He never saw the Därfüris and the Sudanese in general as people subject to Egypt, even though he considered them to be drowning in a sea of wildness and barbarian behavior. He was too personally implicated, and sometimes too personally involved. The voyage charted his reactions to the people and their strong reactions to him, and with those reactions he gauged where he and they were culturally.The map he wrote down offers a geography of the self, not of the state. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 175

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Perron and Muhammad Ali seek publication precisely in 1845, four decades after the travels, and what political work did the account perform then?
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s orientalism and to the broader point about pre-conquest travelers who write inside the coming colonial frame, like earlier reports on Egypt before 1882.