Nineteenth-century Egyptian visitors experienced Europe as a place of being stared at

Evidence

This sort of curiosity is encountered in almost every Middle Eastern description of nineteenth-century Europe. Towards the end of the century, when one or two Egyptian writers began to compose works of fiction in the realistic style of the novel, they made the journey to Europe their first topic. The stories would often evoke the peculiar experience of the West by describing an individual surrounded and stared at, like an object on exhibit. ‘Whenever he paused outside a shop or showroom,’ the protagonist in one such story found on his first day in Paris, ‘a large number of people would surround him, both men and women, staring at his dress and appearance.’ Such stories could be multiplied, but for the time being I want to indicate only this, that for the visitor from the Middle East, Europe was a place where one was liable to become an object on exhibit, at which people gathered and stared. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual Orientalist gaze dynamic — connects to Saidian critique of the observing Western subject, and to the reader’s broader interest in who gets to be the observer.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on ‘Eastward-facing Orientalism’ — the Middle Eastern gaze back at Europe as documented in early Arabic novels, overturning the one-directional-gaze assumption.