Colonial scholarship displaced natives’ own self-understanding with the colonizer’s vision

Evidence

This work resulted in the publication of Description of Egypt, a compendium in twenty-three volumes published between 1809 and 1828. Its detailed information on every aspect of Egyptian society, from monuments to facial structures, was created for use not by Egyptians but by the French. While there is much accurate and valuable information in the Description, the important point that Said makes is that such vast knowledge was amassed without the input of the native people. This account of Egypt served to displace Egypt’s own sense of itself and its place in the world in favor of a French colonial vision of the same. It was ultimately created to help the French dominate the Egyptians. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 160

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to chapter 6 already extracted claim about colonial scholarship amassing knowledge about Egypt without native input.

Related

• French colonial scholarship displaced Egyptians’ own self-understanding (similarity 0.95)
• Colonial scholarship amassed vast knowledge about Egypt without any native input. (similarity 0.93)
• Vast scholarly knowledge of Egyptians was compiled without native input to serve French domination (similarity 0.88)
• Egyptian elites deliberately treated the French as colonial guides (similarity 0.87)
• Enlightened colonialism fused preparation, scholars-in-the-field, and a justifying rationale (similarity 0.83)
• Napoleon’s 1798 Egypt invasion made scholarly knowledge central to colonization (similarity 0.82)
• Napoleon’s Egyptian conquest modeled the civilizing mission on scholarship, preparation, and justification (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian racial thought blended medieval stereotypes with European civilizational concepts (similarity 0.82)
• An Egyptian intellectual saw Egypt’s own colonization as insurance against sharing Africa’s fate. (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian imperialism defined Egypt as separate from and closer to Europe than the Sudan. (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptians realized Europe ranked them closer to Africa than to Europe in civilizational terms (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt’s own imperial past complicates the binary colonial narrative. (similarity 0.81)
• Rendering a land accessible to European scrutiny is itself a form of domination. (similarity 0.81)
• Two generations of Egyptians sought national recognition through ties to the Sudan (similarity 0.80)
• Some Egyptian writers framed imperialism as a civilizing benefit for the colonized. (similarity 0.80)