Writingâs authority shaped communal life across city and village
Evidence
Not just mosques and kuttabs, in fact, but a good part of the communal life of town, village, and city, of marketplace and courtyard, of family and of work, was dependent upon differing practices in relation to the authority of writing. The kuttab in the village and the teaching mosque in the city represent two places of such practice. Their differing treatment of the same text and words, furthermore, was an aspect of the political relation between the authority of the city and the popular life of the village. â Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 297
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes Mitchellâs broader argument about writing, representation, and colonial power; connects to later analyses of mimesis and the âworld as exhibitionâ.