Colonized scholars met European invasion with linguistic purism rather than military strategy

Evidence

It seems strange, that at a moment of profound political crisis he should be as preoccupied as he was with questions of proper linguistic usage and the threat of an uncontrolled spread of new vocabularies. Marsafi’s response to the crisis echoes that of an earlier Egyptian scholar, the historian al-Jabarti, writing on the previous occasion when the country faced the threat of occupation by a European army. The French forces that invaded Egypt in 1798, like the British in 1882, had employed innovative methods of communication. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how both Jabarti and Marsafi treat language purity as the front line — echoes linguistic-nationalism scholarship and the deeper theme of print/telegraph literacy reshaping political response.