Egyptian students were literally trained on French ethnography blaming their own indolence.

Evidence

The Egyptian students who were brought by the French to study in Paris in the 1820s were given Depping’s work to read. Its theme that productive labour formed the true nature of man was at the heart of French plans for the political and economic transformation of Egypt. Rifa`a al-Tahtawi, the most outstanding of the Egyptian scholars, was asked by the French director of the mission to produce an Arabic translation of Depping’s most recent book, Aperçu historique sur les moeurs et coutumes des nations). When Tahtawi returned to Egypt in 1831 carrying in manuscript the numerous translations he had made of French works, the book by Depping was the first that he revised and had printed. At the same time he tried to obtain permission to establish a school in Cairo to teach the ‘moral part’ of geography and history. Although the attempt failed, Tahtawi was later allowed to set up a School of Translation, where amid the demands for translating works of military instruction he was able to teach these subjects. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 347

Categorization

• QUESTION: Did Tahtawi’s translation preserve Depping’s derogatory framing of Egyptians as indolent, or did he subtly alter it? That translation’s fate is worth chasing.
• XREF: Resonates with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s decolonizing-the-mind thesis about colonial education forming colonized subjects.