Egyptian nationalists framed slavery as a domestic civilizing mission toward Sudan.

Evidence

On one side were the defenders of the elite slave buyers, their lawyers, and other nationalists who believed that the case was meant to punish `Alï Pasha Sharif for his petition and that there was no crime in buying Sudanese slaves. These nationalist writers insisted that purchasers of Sudanese slaves were actually conduits of a civilizing mission that taught uneducated and unkempt Sudanese girls the finer arts of domestic life and brought to them a sense of Islam not to be found in the Sudan itself. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 49

During the slavery trial, the pashas’ defenders spoke from this vantage point when they condemned the trespass of the British authorities into Egyptian households and when they upheld the custom of domestic slavery as a civilizing mission that saved the Sudanese, women in particular, from the supposed barbarity into which they had been born. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 60

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘civilizing mission’ framing of Egyptian nationalists toward Sudan will resonate with the reader’s comparative coloniality framework — colonies can themselves be colonial powers.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did this Egyptian civilizing-mission discourse compare to the British framing of Egypt’s own incapacity?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 49; Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 60