An Arab intellectual used European stage-theory to delegitimize anticolonial revolts as premature

Evidence

Writing in the journal he had founded, al-Hilal, on the Indian uprisings of 1857 against the British, Zaydan warned Egyptians of the social disruption that faced them if they did not follow the steady course of development whose stages had been marked out by the West. The Indian revolt against colonialism had failed because India had not yet reached the historical stage in its development that made possible an independent political life. The Indian people had not acquired a knowledge of ‘science and administration’, or an understanding of their obligations to the state. Similarly, discussing the nationalist revolution of 1880–82 in Egypt, Zaydan described the country’s political disorder as the consequence of a ‘premature’ demand for change, by a people that had not properly followed the laws of social development. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 527

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense and unsettling: a colonized intellectual deploying the colonizer’s unilinear development theory to condemn anticolonial resistance in another country. The ideological capture is total, operating through the colonized’s own writing.