European racial theories shaped Islamic modernist reform projects via translation

Evidence

Le Bon developed these ideas in his work on the history of Arab civilisation, which was translated into Arabic in Beirut and widely read in Egypt among the country’s political elite. (Among those who admired the book was Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian scholar and educationalist whose re-interpretation of Islamic history and doctrine was to have a wide influence. Abduh’s view of a reformed Islam, as a system of social discipline and instruction with which an intellectual and political elite would organise the country’s ‘political education’ and thus assure its stability and its evolution, was indebted to his reading of Le Bon and other French social scientists; and indeed when he visited France he paid a call on Le Bon.) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 400

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with my library’s work on how colonial categories get adopted by the colonized elite — parallels the ‘complaints about immodesty’ material where moral panics cross cultures, and the Le Bon circulation mirrors how the veil became an active revolutionary instrument in later sources.
• SEED: An essay angle: the strange genealogy of Islamic modernism via French racial social science — Abduh’s reform Islam as an import of Le Bon’s elite-discipline doctrine.