Mubarak saw Egyptian colonialism in Sudan as necessary self-strengthening

Evidence

Wadad al-Qadi convincingly argues that this narrative fits into a genre of “the Arab rediscovery of Europe—books quite in fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century,” as the success of al-Tahtawï’s Takhlïs al-ibriz in 1834 had shown. But Mubärak, unlike al-Tahtawï, did not just inform his Egyptian readers about affairs and customs in the West. Instead, `Alam al- Dïn “put the East in a direct situation of actual confrontation with the West, so that the East, before the West, knows its proper place in world civilization.” This is why Africa was so important, for it too was in confrontation with the West and the East. Only through the strengthening process of confronting Africa through scientific exploration, reform of education, and colonialism could Egyptians possibly maintain themselves in what had become a new world order. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 271

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends al-Tahtawi’s civilizing-mission idea in Sudan that the reader has been tracking; ties to broader literature on anti-colonial elites adopting colonial logic.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that an Egyptian modernizer justifies his own colonialism over Africa as the price of standing before the West — a dense, layered claim about how colonial categories replicate downward.