Cultural arguments for Egyptian control mirrored British imperial ideology

Evidence

Fawzï translated Sudanese gestures of sharing to mean that the Sudanese had no cultural unity, nothing that bound them together as a cohesive, protective community. In his writings, all that linked the numerous tribes of the Sudan were his description of these un-Islamic customs, making the Muslim northerners as ignorant of religion as the pagan southern tribes, rendering the entire Sudan as needful of Egyptian control. If fathers do not protect their daughters, if family honor bears no significance, then, according to Fawzï, Sudanese women amount to little more than prostitutes or slaves. Thus, the Sudanese would never know exactly who they were without Egyptian cultural intervention. Here, Fawzï reveals his profound sympathy to British definitions of a nation and to the prevailing arguments for the cohesion that imperialism could offer weaker societies. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 602

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A colonized people (Egyptians) adopted the colonizer’s (British) civilizing-mission framework and turned it against fellow Africans — a layered coloniality worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to how sub-imperial or intermediate colonial regimes (like Egypt in Sudan) reproduce the logic of their own colonizers — parallels settler-colonial and mandate literature.
• DEFINE: Illustrates a distinctive shade of coloniality: an intermediate/subaltern empire justifying itself with borrowed civilizational rhetoric.