Egyptian elite anxiety targeted the urban crowd, not colonial occupation

Evidence

Muhammad al-Muwailihi wrote Isa ibn Hisham at the same time as two influential friends of his own age, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, were writing the similar works of social criticism I have already mentioned, one describing the country’s condition as a state of absolute disorganisation, the other as part of a universal social crisis. The three men were all members of the same social and literary salon, where they mixed with fellow government servants, magistrates, and prosecuters, with members of some of the country’s important Turkish families, with British officials, and with visiting Orientalist scholars. The concern among those who gathered in such salons towards the end of the nineteenth century was not so much the colonial occupation, from which as landowners, merchants and government officials their families were beginning to benefit even as they resented the fact of European control, but the crowd that threatened in the streets and cafés outside. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 373

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the object of fin-de-siècle Egyptian salon anxiety: social disorder and the crowd, rather than resistance to colonial rule.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and to recent work on how colonial-era elites reoriented anxiety toward indigenous populations rather than colonizers.