The idea that romantic love grounds family value entered Egypt as a colonial import

Evidence

Ahmed is right to describe Amin’s text, with its contempt for Egyptian domesticity and its insistence on the supreme importance of abolishing the veil, as the reproduction of a “Western colonial discourse.” But here I want to focus on something else: the appearance of the conception that love between a man and a woman is the necessary basis of the only kind of family life that can have any value, and the assumption that legal conditions are necessary for ensuring domestic bliss. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my existing interest in moral panics over dress and domestic norms in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — veiling abolition reform echoes sumptuary-law moralizing.
• ADDENDUM: Directly augments ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: the Egyptian veil debate is another case where ‘immodesty’ discourse masks class and political signaling imported from the colonial center.