Amin blamed Egypt’s decline on abandoning Islam, not on Islam itself

Evidence

Qasim Amin did not question Harcourt’s essential distinction between vitality as the characteristic of the West and the thousand-year immobility of his own country, or the ascription of its causes to certain mental traits. In fact he went further and said that their consequence in present-day Egypt was a condition not just of relative decline, but of ‘désorganisation absolue’. He differed with Harcourt by attributing this disorder, as he saw it, and the mental traits that caused it, not to Islam but to the abandoning of Islam. Religion had provided the principles of an order that was now lost. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 363

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the colonial framing of the East as immobile/vital West dichotomy that runs throughout Mitchell’s argument about colonial power structures.