Egyptian nationalists used historical fiction to shape the Sudan narrative before 1900

Evidence

Jurji Zaydan’s historical novel Asir al-mutamahdï (Prisoner of the False Mahdï) first printed in 1892. The figure of Fawzï Pasha added historical weight to this fictional piece, self-consciously intended to represent “objective” truths about the Sudan problem. Zaydan had worked as an interpreter for British intelligence in the Sudan in 1884, and he claimed intimate “familiarity with the customs of the Sudanese people and the circumstances of the rising of their false Prophet.” Zaydan said, in his introduction to Asir’s first edition, that he also relied heavily on the testimonies of those who had escaped the Mahdï, making the novel just as “reliable as any book of history.” In this novel in which any supporter of `Uräbï appears foolishly naive if not treacherous to Egypt, and in which the British are romanticized, Fawzï Pasha is portrayed as sorrowfully describing the deprivations of the inhabitants of Khartoum and the lost hopes of the besieged for any sight of their delayed English rescuers. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 541

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core project of how colonial-era texts constructed the Egyptian-Sudanese relationship; echoes modern scholarship on fiction as historical evidence.
• SEED: Article angle: how the first generation of Arabic historical fiction doubled as colonial-era political argument, anticipating today’s contested historiography of the Mahdiya.