European colonizers attributed Egyptian backwardness to inborn mental traits immune to reform

Evidence

The need to open up the inaccessible world of women and thereby produce ‘a generation of mothers’ was a theme taken up among Egyptian writers, in particular by Qasim Amin, a member of a large landowning family and one of the young government prosecutors employed, like Zaghlul, in the new, Europeanised legal system. … The backwardness of the Egyptians, Harcourt had said, was due to certain mental traits that no administrative reforms by the British could ever noticeably alter. These included a submissive character, an insensibility to pain, a habit of dishonesty, and above all an intellectual lethargy that had rendered all Oriental societies immobile, unable to undergo any real historical or political transformation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the colonial ‘culture vs. administration’ debate; also to the national-character construct seen in Milgrom’s trade-reputation work.
• QUESTION: Qasim Amin is often cast as a feminist pioneer — worth chasing how far his project was actually a colonial-disciplinary one in service of the state.