Colonial writers attributed Egyptian backwardness to fixed mental traits

Evidence

The need to open up the inaccessible world of women and thereby produce ‘a generation of mothers’ was a theme taken up among Egyptian writers, in particular by Qasim Amin, a member of a large landowning family and one of the young government prosecutors employed, like Zaghlul, in the new, Europeanised legal system. … The backwardness of the Egyptians, Harcourt had said, was due to certain mental traits that no administrative reforms by the British could ever noticeably alter. These included a submissive character, an insensibility to pain, a habit of dishonesty, and above all an intellectual lethargy that had rendered all Oriental societies immobile, unable to undergo any real historical or political transformation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 362 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: European colonizers attributed Egyptian backwardness to inborn mental traits immune to reform — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 362; Colonial discourse constructed the European and Oriental minds as fixed binary opposites — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 124; Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority

Broader Connections

• European colonizers attributed Egyptian backwardness to inborn mental traits immune to reform #corroborates (0.97) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 362