Egyptians feared being racialized as African and thus vulnerable to colonization like Sudan

Evidence

After 1882, the failure of `Uräbï’s forces and the British occupation occurred within the context of the European scramble for Africa, a context about which Egyptians were growing more aware thanks to the spread of newspapers and journals in their country. A third, disquieting element entered Egyptians’ ideas of territorial conquest in Africa. This was the uncomfortable realization that, in the eyes of western European culture, Egypt stood somewhere closer to Africa than to Europe when measured on a scale that calibrated the achievements of each civilization, and that Egypt was just as vulnerable to conquest and colonization as the Sudan. Against this tense and conflicted background, Egyptian writers and politicians labored to assert Egypt’s separateness from such vulnerability in their descriptions and characterizations of their own society. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 349

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compressed, double-mirror colonial structure: Egypt colonizes Sudan while dreading being positioned beside Sudan on Europe’s civilizational scale — an elegant model of sub-imperial anxiety worth sitting with.
• XREF: Directly echoes earlier chapter themes of Egyptians’ vexed self-positioning; connects to broader literature on sub-imperialism and ‘civilization’ hierarchies in settler/colonial Africa.