Egyptian colonial writing linked Africans to Arabs’ own pre-Islamic past

Evidence

My reading of Alam al-Dïn leads me to think that Alï Mubärak was not so dismissive of Africans. There is a stronger identification with Africans within the text, and the narrative finds interesting links between Africans and Egyptians. For example, after many pages of excoriation, `Alam al-Dïn himself notes that the “ugly practices” of the Africans were once practiced also by Arabs in the pre-Islamic era. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 283

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Foreshadows later Arab nationalist framings of Sudan and the tension between Arab kinship claims and civilizational hierarchy.

Related

• Egyptian-oriented Sudanese press treated African cultural elements as obstacles to Arab glory. (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptians internalized a civilizing mission toward Africa to assert parity with Europe. (similarity 0.83)
• Egypt’s colonizing discourse toward Sudan was a projection of European civilizing ideology. (similarity 0.83)
• Mubarak saw Egyptian colonialism in Sudan as necessary self-strengthening (similarity 0.83)
• Egyptians realized Europe ranked them closer to Africa than to Europe in civilizational terms (similarity 0.83)
• Mubarak’s 1857 novelized his views of Egypt and Sudan (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptians grew uneasy that Europeans ranked Egypt as African and colonizable. (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian nationalists rejected any racial identification with Africans being colonized (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian slavery discourse conflated African slaves with Circassian ones (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptians feared being racialized as African and thus vulnerable to colonization like Sudan (similarity 0.81)
• The Sudan’s ethnic divisions outweighed its religious and linguistic ties to Egypt (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian colonial writers justified domination by styling Sudanese identity as deficient (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian Sudanese colony was administered increasingly by Arabic-speaking native Egyptians (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian nationalists saw Egypt as uniquely placed between civilized Europe and fanatical Africa. (similarity 0.81)
• An Egyptian intellectual saw Egypt’s own colonization as insurance against sharing Africa’s fate. (similarity 0.81)