The Encyclopaedia of Islam reframed Urabi’s political rhetoric as confusion

Evidence

Urabi’s statements in court are quoted in the article on the modern term ‘Hizb’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, with a very different approach to language. The article’s purpose is to show how the word hizb, ‘albeit slowly, unconsciously and hesitatingly … has come to be stabilized in meaning and to signify unambiguously a political party’. Urabi’s powerful claim that both the nationalist leadership and the Egyptian people could be called a hizb is cited to illustrate what is called the originally ‘ambiguous and fluctuating’ meaning of the term. The word ‘stands in Urabi’s mind for two different meanings’, says the Encyclopaedia, ‘which he cannot clearly distinguish’. Since Urabi’s time, it can then be shown, the word has evolved, ‘albeit slowly’, from this state of confusion to one of clarity – a movement, in other words, from hesitation to certainty, from ambiguity to unambiguousness, from instability to stability, and from unconsciousness, it is implied, to political awareness. The movement traced by the Encyclopaedia, moreover, is not just the history of a word. The word stands in people’s minds for a meaning, and its development is taken to represent the gradual development of this meaning, this political mind. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 435

Categorization

• XREF: This is the colonial/developmentalist teleology Mitchell dismantles throughout the book — the same progress narrative (‘from confusion to clarity’) he identifies in the notion of representation as a copy. Connects to postcolonial readings of dictionary/encyclopedia entries.
• SEED: A piece on how reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries) quietly encode colonial teleologies — how the ‘history of a word’ becomes a narrative of a ‘political mind’ maturing.