Egyptian legal reform along European lines was a tool for resisting European penetration

Evidence

Thus Brown argues that contrary to the repeated nationalist claim that the Mixed Courts were imposed because of the capitulations, the Mixed Courts were in fact a means by which a partially independent Egyptian government sought to limit the capitulations. This motivation, he says, should be attributed to the entire movement of legal reform along European lines because the latter can be seen as a tool for resisting direct European penetration. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1020

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the standard metropole-imposition narrative of colonial law, parallel to how Brown disputes top-down accounts — relevant to the reader’s broader inquiry into how ‘modern’ institutions get attributed to the West.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which Egyptian nationalist historians asserted the Mixed Courts were purely imposed, and how does this revisionist reading sit with Rudolph Peters’s contrary claim (fn 23, 1024)?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 1020