Colonized visitors found Europe’s copy of their culture a grotesque fake

Evidence

The Egyptian visitors were disgusted by all this and stayed away. Their final embarrassment had been to enter the door of the mosque and discover that, like the rest of the street, it had been erected as what the Europeans called a façade. ‘Its external form as a mosque was all that there was. As for the interior, it had been set up as a coffee house, where Egyptian girls performed dances with young males, and dervishes whirled.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 52

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The pivotal reversal: the ‘real’ Egyptians shock the colonizer’s consumers, and the façade-emptying of the mosque condenses how European representation hollowed out the thing it claimed to copy — a dense microcosm of the book’s whole thesis about colonial mimesis and display.