The first book printed on Arabic presses taught that superstition thrives in villages.

Evidence

14 As early as the 1830s Rifa`a al-Tahtawi, who was working as a translator at the government’s military hospital, produced books in Arabic on European medicine. The first work of general interest to be printed on the new Arabic printing presses was Tahtawi’s translation of a French book written for children on the ‘manners and customs’ of different nations, which included sections on ‘False beliefs, heresies and superstitions’, stressing that ‘such errors are greater in the village than in the city’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the book’s recurring theme of colonial modernity aligning city with order/reason and countryside with superstition — the rural-urban hierarchy that organizes the whole argument.