Early Egyptian feminism reproduced colonial patriarchal dominance under liberation’s guise.

Evidence

In a powerful critique of that work, Leila Ahmed has argued that “In calling for women’s liberation the thoroughly patriarchal Amin was in fact calling for the transformation of Muslim society along the lines of the Western model and for the substitution of the garb of Islamic-style male dominance by that of Western-style male dominance. Under the guise of a plea for a ‘liberation’ of woman, then, he conducted an attack that in its fundamentals reproduced the colonizer’s attack on native culture and society.” It was designed, in other words, to help eradicate bad habits among the natives. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1119

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the vaulted ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article: the moral panic over the veil here is doubly coded — reformers attacking indigenous dress on Western terms. Also connects to Cooper’s thesis about modernizing discourse smuggling normative Christianity inward. — connects to: Colonial rule worsened Egyptian women’s education despite feminist rhetoric — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 159
• SEED: This is the reverse-image of the immodesty article: a moral panic engineered by the colonized elite themselves, importing Western standards to attack fellow natives — an essay on how liberation discourse can carry colonial dominance inward.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the immodesty-dress article with a precise mechanism: dress reform (‘unveiling’) deployed by a patriarch as internalized colonization rather than by a colonizer from outside.