Westernization entered the Middle East chiefly through secular schools and print media.

Evidence

Albert Hourani has shown that westernization worked in the Middle East through the expansion of secularized schools—from primary levels to highly specialized professional institutions—and books, periodicals, and newspapers that eventually came to be called a cultural awakening, or nahda, in the Levant and Egypt. This awakening created new arenas in which the most sensitive issues of the time could be discussed among a small but increasingly literate audience, setting the stage for nationalist discourse as print media expanded. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 78

Categorization

• QUESTION: How exactly do the cultural-awakening print arenas connect to the Sudan, given the author’s Egypt-Sudan angle? Worth chasing as the chapter develops.
• DEFINE: Defines nahda (cultural awakening) as the secular-education and print-expansion channel through which westernization operated.
• XREF: Resonates with Benedict Anderson’s imagined-communities argument linking print capitalism to nationalism.