Pan-Islamism emerged as resistance to European economic exploitation.

Evidence

As Alexander Scholch notes, the movement’s ideas—which took shape amid terrible financial pressure suffered by both the Ottoman state and the Egyptian government—were, above all, the beginning of resistance to economic exploitation by the European powers. Scholch helpfully lists the different, intermingling shapes that the concept of nationalism took in Egypt of the late 1870s: “Isma`ïl’s striving for independence, his imperial dreams, his attempt to resist European intervention with the help of a ‘national party’; genuine Egyptian patriotism; the ‘quasi-national’ ideas of a pan-Arab sociocultural risorgimento; pan-Islamic thought based on the religious authority of the Sultan; secularist endeavors to strengthen the Ottoman Empire in the East as a whole against the European danger. These ideas often overlapped, and sometimes they were adopted at the same time by one and the same person.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 451

Categorization

• XREF: Crucial for the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan comparison: the spectrum of Egyptian nationalist forms available, in contrast to the Mahdïya’s religious-military model in Sudan. — connects to: Pan-Islamism replaced pan-Arabism as the leading anti-imperialist force. — Youssef Cherif, Neo-pan-Arabism: a renewed contract of…, 40
• SEED: The overlapping, simultaneously-held nationalist ideas of 1870s Egypt invite an essay on how ‘shades of coloniality’ map to a spectrum of anti-colonialisms rather than a single response.