Egyptian modernizer Marsafi saw political crisis as a breakdown of textual authority

Evidence

Marsafi supported the general spread of schooling, so that teachers would be able to use words like ‘patriotism’ repeatedly in the classroom and explain their proper meaning. The book criticised traditional scholars for having lost their moral and political authority, and advocated in their place the new authority of teachers over students in the government schools. And yet, the book was still caught up in other, older notions of authority. Unlike the nationalist leadership, Marsafi was opposed to the uncontrolled spread of printing in Egypt. He argued the need for a body of properly educated scholars who would be responsible for the books and journals to be printed, in order to control the misuse of writing. Indeed, he understood the political crisis as a whole in terms of the breakdown of a textual authority, evident in the proliferation of words ‘on the tongues of the younger generation today’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 420

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The tension between wanting modern schooling yet opposing free print, and reading politics as a textual-authority breakdown, is a rich paradigm of how authority shifts between media regimes.