Egyptian nationalists blamed British occupation on defects in their own national character.

Evidence

With the translation of works like Self-Help, then, the Egyptian character or mentality could be treated as a distinct and problematic object, the object upon which society and its strength were said to depend. The very occupation of the country by the British could be blamed upon defects in the Egyptian character, defects whose remedy was Egypt’s political task. Nationalist writers in the first years of the twentieth century frequently compared the colonial occupation of their country with the situation of Japan, as the Japanese defeated first the Chinese and then the Russians at war. The major difference accounting for the success of the Japanese in defeating the largest country in Asia and the largest country in Europe was the difference between the Japanese and Egyptian mentality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of colonized peoples internalizing colonial self-descriptions — echoes themes in Fanon and the Orientalism discussion; also parallels the ‘character formation’ cult of Samuel Smiles that recurred across many societies.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the Self-Help translation itself get read — as a manual of self-improvement or as a diagnosis of national deficiency? The reception framing matters for whether internalization was deliberate.