Egyptian racial thought blended medieval stereotypes with European civilizational concepts

Evidence

In fact, race is an important marker of difference for all four writers, who painstakingly noted racial differences in skin color, sexual behavior, and religious attitudes among the Sudanese. Sometimes the writers seem to have plucked these concepts from medieval literature about blacks and Sudanese, but more often they mixed stereotypes about blacks with new terminology about power and concepts of civilization translated from European texts. As this chapter shows, however, al-Tahtawï’s perceptions were different from those of the other three writers, reflecting, I think, a hardening perspective of Egyptian intellectuals about the nature of Egyptian identity and its measure against African societies. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 137

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to wider scholarship on how non-European colonial elites appropriated European racial-scientific categories while retaining indigenous hierarchies.

Related

• Egyptian writers blended medieval Black stereotypes with imported European power terminology (similarity 0.94)
• Egyptian writers conceded Europe authority over artistic standards. (similarity 0.91)
• Egyptian racial constructions of blackness hardened mid-century. (similarity 0.90)
• Egyptian writers collapsed Nubian and Sudanese into one racial type. (similarity 0.86)
• Egyptians realized Europe ranked them closer to Africa than to Europe in civilizational terms (similarity 0.85)
• Slave-descended Sudanese were deemed too lowly to speak for the nation (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian defenses of slavery glossed over the Sudanese slave trade’s harshness (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian nationalism imported from France became racialized against the Sudanese (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian nationalists rejected any racial identification with Africans being colonized (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian writers framed Egyptian rule as a civilizing force over a wild Sudan (similarity 0.84)
• Sudanese and Egyptians reciprocally held condescension and resentment shaped by colonial hierarchies. (similarity 0.84)
• Sudanese nationalism drew on blacks long considered slaves (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian intellectuals increasingly racialized identity against African societies (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian nationalist leaders adopted consciously racializing language by the early 1900s. (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian nationalism and colonialism became linked through racial difference (similarity 0.84)