FOR THE LOVE OF LOST SOVEREIGNTY: EGYPT AND POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT DISARMING WORDS: EMPIRE AND THE SEDUCTIONS OF TRANSLATION IN EGYPT
Shaden Tageldin’s fascinating book from 2011 makes use of styles of analysis drawn from literary critics and theorists associated with postcolonial thought—Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha—but foregrounds an implicit comparison between India and Egypt, stressing the profound distinctiveness of the Egyptian example. Rather than the predominant emphasis on difference between Briton and Indian in the South Asian context, this colonial encounter begins with Napoleon proclaiming in a French document (ambiguously translated into Arabic), “nous sommes amis des vrais musulmans”: either “we are friends of the true Muslims” or, more interestingly, “we are friends, true Muslims” (33). These become the “disarming words” invoked by the title of this work, words meant to preempt and preclude a Hegelian fight to the death; in this colonial romance, the colonized is “seduced” into loving a better version of himself, which he sees in the colonizer. She argues that the colonized male (this text pays close attention to sexual identification throughout) sees an improved, more rigorous—if more effete—version of his own culture, indeed of himself, in the colonizer. One gets the sense that Tageldin must have been struck as she worked through her Arabic material with the almost comic contrasts with South Asian exemplars: instead of an effeminate Bengali produced in English prose as a differend to British colonial masculinity, in the Arabic texts she cites from Hasan al-Attar (who for a time was rector