Instead of sending his petition to the Egyptian khedive Abbas Hilmï II, Alï Pasha sent it to Lord Cromer, the British consul-general who had run the economic and political infrastructure of the country since the British military occupation of 1882.

The pashas' lawyers claimed that the women were beneficiaries of generous and educational domestic employment. For men like Frith Bey, the slave women could only be described as victims, innocent and ignorant prey to marauding slave raiders and unscrupulous Muslim elites.

In 1884, only ten years before the slavery trial, this bond had been severed by a powerful rebellion that occurred almost simultaneously with the British occupation of Egypt.

Though Zanüba's assertion of Islamic origins undermined many of the assumptions about Egyptian colonization of the Sudan and British colonization of Egypt, unfortunately, in 1894, the Sudan was hotly contested and little understood, and indigenous interpretations of its political geography did not yet count for much.

The trial revealed Egyptian nationalism at a peculiar nexus: Egypt was colonized by the British and yet often eager to recolonize the Sudanese in some way or another. The racial constructions inherent in these circumstances were also complex. Shaghlüb, the Bedouin slave trader, could claim a slave as his wife with none of the taboo of racial miscegenation that a similar marriage would have borne in Great Britain or the United States.

The British had occupied Egypt in 1882, shortly after the emergence of the first Egyptian patriotic rebellion, known as the Uräbï rebellion after its leader, Colonel Ahmad Uräbï. Although the incorporation of Egypt into the British empire was informal, it was efficiently executed. Two years later, a Sudanese religious leader known as the Mahdï completed his revolt, seizing Khartoum and evicting Egypt from territory it had ruled since 1821.The British occupation remained confined to Egypt until 1898, when British-led armies invaded the regions of the Sudan held by the Mahdist government and again annexed them to Egypt.

It is true that the administration of the Sudan was known as the Turkïya by generations of Sudanese, because the Sudan initially had been conquered by Turkish- speaking officers for Muhammad Alï (also known as Mehemet Alï), the Albanian Ottoman officer who was acting as a governor of Egypt for the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. But the characterization of the administration as Turkish by people unfamiliar with the ethnic nuances of Egypt's population also disguises the fact that native-born, Arabic-speaking Egyptians participated in the colony's administration, more prominently as decades passed and the administration strengthened its roots.

Voicing his fear that the British were ready to conquer the Sudan, a fear shared by many in Egypt and soon to be proven correct, Kämil characterized the country as "Egyptian property" to which the British had no right. So as not to leave doubts about the forcible nature of Egypt's potential reconquest of the region lost to the Mahdï, Kämil announced that "our army, even less than our whole army, would have been enough to accomplish this result."

Surely, Kämil's remarks assume a knowledge of and power over the Sudan similar to those of Lord Balfour regarding Egypt. At the same time, Kämil's article is stamped by anger and defiance toward the British. This is the lan- guage of colonialism as well, but unique in the simultaneity of its aggres- sion toward the Sudan and defensiveness toward Great Britain.

What Kämil and many other theoreticians of Egyptian nationalist ideals expressed was the perspective of the colonized colonizer. This duality gave these men a Janus-like view of the world in which they lived, and of the nation they wished to bequeath the next generation of Egyptians: an Egypt whose past greatness and regional power could be grasped once again in the Sudan, free of the political and economic control of the British government.

Conquered by Sultan Selim I in 1516, Egypt in the early nine- teenth century was a country steeped in the traditions of the Ottoman Empire, with a ruling class of Ottoman governors, officials, and descen- dants—an Ottoman-Egyptian elite. Although many of these elite had been born in Egypt, they were often most comfortable speaking and writing in Turkish.

Thus my study differs from other explorations of Egyptian nationalism: I examine not a Manichean binary relationship between colonizer and colonized, but a more fluid relationship, in which the colonizer came from more than one continent, and the colo- nized could aspire to be a colonizer not only by adopting the tools of the British, or the traditions of the Ottomans, but also by making the Sudan a part of what defined Egypt as truly Egyptian.

1884. In just four years, Egypt had become a de facto colony of Great Britain and had lost its own colony in the Sudan, all during a period when certain pivotal groups of Egyptians were beginning to distinguish themselves cul- turally and ethnically from the Ottoman-Egyptian elites who occupied the highest posts in the country. The resulting triangle of colonialism marked by Great Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan thus had a profound imprint on the development of Egyptian nationalism.

Using examples like this, taken from a 1910 speech made by Lord Balfour— the former British prime minister, experienced member of Parliament, and colonial administrator in India, Egypt, and southern Africa—Said demon- strated how deeply the themes of knowledge and power ran within the imaginations of the men working to create and maintain the British empire.

As Ania Loomba writes, "'Colonialism' is not just something that happens from outside a country or a people, not just something that operates with the collusion of forces inside, but a ver- sion of it can be duplicated from within."

What my study challenges in Said's work is the idea that Egyptians suffered in silence, the idea that many in Egypt did not themselves engage in a dis- course of stereotypes and fantasies about the Sudan specifically and Africa in general, a discourse that paralleled Orientalist imagery.

What my study challenges in Said's work is the idea that Egyptians suffered in silence, the idea that many in Egypt did not themselves engage in a dis- course of stereotypes and fantasies about the Sudan specifically and Africa in general, a discourse that paralleled Orientalist imagery. Although he wrote many pages on the objectification of Egypt in European literature, Said did not include in Orientalism a single sample of Egyptian literature or a discussion of Egyptians' long history of creative and eventually successful response to the British occupation.

For example, Eric Hobs- bawm characterizes the response of the "dependent countries" as an effort to incorporate the model of the West: "For all governments and elites of countries faced with dependency or conquest, it had been clear for several decades that they had to westernize or go under." Even those who resisted British or French imperialism and the totalizing transformations of culture that westernization implied did so by "Westernizing to some extent."

More specifically, Albert Hourani has shown that westernization worked in the Middle East through the expansion of secularized schools—from pri- mary levels to highly specialized professional institutions—and books, peri- odicals, and newspapers that eventually came to be called a cultural awak- ening, 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.

Perhaps another reason colonialism in Egypt should be attributed to more than one source, as Mitchell presents it, is that, dur- ing much of the nineteenth century, Egypt was nominally the province or dependency of two empires, the Ottoman and the British. But Mitchell’s account neglects the fact that, for much of the nineteenth century, Egypt also attempted to establish its own empire, in the Sudan. He acknowledges that, for a brief time in the early part of the century, Egypt controlled terri- tories as far east as the Hijaz, as far west as the Morea, as far north as Syria, and as far south as the Sudan. But he dismisses this in the next sentence, writing that the empire was forcibly dismantled by local revolt and foreign intervention. It is certainly true that Egypt lost control of most of these territories by the 1840s, but the Sudan remained under Egyptian authority from 1821 until 1884. These six decades (almost the length of the British occupation of Egypt) affected the lives of many Egyptians—differently than their encounter with western Europe but in ways just as profound and com- plicated.

Thousands of colonized bureaucrats made their way to the colonial metropole, in search of this fra- ternity, and found themselves excluded by the uglier, more racist fact that imperialism and its instruction in the language of the empire, did not guar- antee one the right to belong to the imperial nation—to what Anderson calls the “official nationalism.”

Anderson situates the origin of this linguistic evolution in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but he finds its real impact in nationalist movements in societies colonized by western European nations. The work of “imagining the community” was performed by “pil- grim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen.”Through them, a model “of the independent national state was available for pirating,” a model which privileged the ideas that specific groups of people owned their languages and that “these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.”Thousands of colonized bureaucrats made their way to the colonial metropole, in search of this fra- ternity, and found themselves excluded by the uglier, more racist fact that imperialism and its instruction in the language of the empire, did not guar- antee one the right to belong to the imperial nation—to what Anderson calls the “official nationalism.”And so the new intelligentsia, created by the schools and bureaucratic needs of the empire, became central to the devel- opment of nationalism in the colonial regions, their “bilingual literacy” giv- ing them a “vanguard role.”

In terms of racism, with its implications of discrimination and biological dif- ference,Anderson's position is appropriate to the discourse of non-European colonized and European colonizer. But his presentation of racism is an over- simplification of the term, one that deserves more complicated questioning. As Etienne Balibar has written in partial answer to Anderson, “There is not merely a single invariant racism but a number of racisms, forming a broad, open spectrum of situations.” Racism, then, can be as unique as any virus or, as Balibar puts it,“a determinate racist configuration has no fixed frontiers; it is a stage in a development which its own latent potentialities, as well as historical circumstances and the relations of force within the social forma- tion, will shunt around within the spectrum of possible racisms.”

Labeling nineteenth-century Egyptians with such a term clouds the discussion and attributes power that simply did not exist; by keeping his discussion of race limited to the idea of racism, Anderson avoids a much more complicated investigation. However, it is just as anachronistic to deny race consciousness in cultures confronting British or French or German imperialism in the late nineteenth century, when political, cultural, and sci- entific definitions of the word race were being coined. In terms of construc- tion of race, or even consciousness of race, the very system of racial identi- fication that Anderson rightly ascribes to Europe did not simply melt into a broth of political love when confronted by indigenous, colonized national- ists. The appellations and categories of race imposed by the empire were either accepted, denied, translated, or redirected, but they were always provocative. In late-nineteenth-century Egypt, writers and nationalists were acutely aware of the discourse on race being conducted in western Europe, and they used it to frame their various perspectives about the Sudan and its people. This should not be interpreted to mean that they were themselves racists, or even that they held the power to discriminate racially, but ana- lysts of race and nationalism should take care not to assume that national- ists in Egypt were deaf and blind to the very charged issue of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There were many nuances to cer- tain terms: abïd (slave), barbarï (Berber or barbarian), nübï (Nubian), arabï (Arab), and südänï, to name a few that bore particular significance in the hierarchy of political and economic relations from one end of the Nile Valley to the other. … Within the literature of Egyptian nationalism, especially the literature of writers of colloquial Arabic who paid particular attention to nuances, such words were immensely controversial. Moreover, these words were not sim- ple impositions by Egyptians on Sudanese. As Anders Bjorkelo shows, such words could also be found in the language of Sudanese traders and religious leaders, people as sensitive to difference and community as the nationalists of Egypt. These were words of the market and the slave trade, and were of grave importance in identifying who could be sold and who could not. One Sudanese tribe could identify another with such words and could reveal a kinship based on shared religion or trade networks.And as the colonial rela- tionship between Egypt and the Sudan became politicized as a result of the British occupation, the meanings changed. Eventually, words signifying “slave” or “black,” even the word for Sudanese, would be used in the Sudan itself to identify who was considered suitable by a certain kind of educated Sudanese to speak of the Sudanese nation.

When addressing the issue of the Sudan, nationalist writers often created characters who spoke with a certain kind of Sudanese voice or accent and who discussed important themes of the time, like companionate marriage or slavery or the unity of the Nile Valley. … For Egyptian nationalists, the argument with the British remained heated in such dialogues, as did the effort to convince the Sudanese of Egyptian rights to sovereignty over them.

As the household became a metaphor for Egypt's engagement with “modernity,” the presence of domestic servants and slaves had somehow to be addressed, and the other six Sudanese women thus served as “boundary markers” (as Anne McClintock labels the role of domestics in Victorian culture) in that they were examples of “evolutionary belatedness evidenced by their ‘feminine’ lack of history, reason and proper domestic arrangements.”

Lord Cromer considered the seclusion of Muslim women and their lack of education a major obstacle to Egyptian self-government.As a result, British efforts to establish schools for girls were central to the empire's civilizing mission in Egypt. … A French- educated Egyptian lawyer named Qäsim Amïn published Tahrïr al-mar´a (The Liberation of Women) in 1899, a revolutionary book at the time that advocated education for women and equated women's low social status with the status of the Egyptian nation.

Although the British opponents and the Egyptian defenders of the slave-buying pashas were divided about the boundaries between Egypt and the Sudan, it is ironic that on this boundary of slave women they were in agreement: the civilizing mission would enable slave women to be trained differently and brought into a new, modern era.

Given the layers of meaning surrounding these women, there is great irony in the fact that the six slaves left the courtroom and were placed in the Cairo Home for Freed Slaves, an institution created by the British as a sort of training and employment clearinghouse, where manumitted black women could find paying jobs, as domestics, keeping their connection to the institution of the family respectable. Once they left the auspices of this ide- alizing home, Fatima, Sa`ïda, Halïma, Maräsila, and Maryam also left the historical record and disappeared into, one hopes, better and more stable lives. But the issues they raised for Great Britain's civilizing mission in Egypt, and Egypt's civilizing mission for the Sudan, were far from over.

By revealing the intrinsic alterity of the "colonized colonizer" theme in important articulations of Egyptian nationalism, my study challenges many accepted tenets of the binary relationship between European empires and non-European colonies still prevalent within the fields of postcolonial, cul- tural, African, and Middle Eastern studies.

In an article on black slavery in Egypt,Terence Walz discusses the puzzle presented by what he calls the "minimal impact black Africans have had on the biological make-up of Egyptians." Walz asks, "If it is true that as many as 800,000 Africans were forcibly settled in the country during the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries, why is there so little 'African' imprint on the general population?"

Universally considered to have sown the first seeds of an Egyptian sense of nationalism, al-Tahtawï also set down on paper important tropes about the Sudan, a place he despised yet considered intrinsic to the territo- rial and historical integrity of Egypt. On one hand, al-Tahtawï made his concept of watan (homeland) legendary with his historical perspective on Egypt's place in the Nile Valley. On the other, his disparaging remarks about the "blackness" of the Sudanese offer an important introduction to the racial constructions of the Sudanese that influenced many writers after his time.

Egypt was simultaneously affected by its identity as the province of an increasingly weak Ottoman Empire, its own confrontation with the British occupation of 1882, and its loss of the Sudan to the superior strategy of the charismatic Mahdï.

Looking at Darwïsh's songs, which were intended to be sung in a variation of Sudanese Arabic dialect, and at Alï al-Kassär's portrayal, in blackface, of the half-Nubian, half-Sudanese ne'er-do-well Osman abd al- Basit, this chapter considers the ways in which caricatures of the Sudanese became central to Egyptian articulations of national identity. At the same time that these two performers were making Cairene audiences laugh, another revolution was emerging in the Sudan, led by a group known as the White Flag League, who protested the British government of the Sudan (known as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium).

Medieval Arabic geographers of Africa defined the continent with a para- doxical mixture of fact, legend, and mystery. Some, like Ibn Batuta and al- Mas`üdï, visited different parts of Africa; others, like al-Kazwinï and al- Idrisï, synthesized the information of other voyages into their geographical work. Most were indebted to the works of the Greek geographers, some- times including Greek views of African cannibalism and savagery unques- tioningly in their own accounts; others were deeply struck by the differ- ences between African societies and their own Islamic cultures. By the end of the fourteenth century, the map of Black Africa reflected a combination of mythical and empirical knowledge or, in the words of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias,"the interplay of the ideological and the cognitive."

As J. B. Harley writes, "So the surveyor, whether conscious or otherwise, replicates not just the 'environment' in some abstract sense but equally the territorial imperatives of a particular political system. Whether a map is produced under the banner of cartographic sci- ence—as most official maps have been—or whether it is an overt propa- ganda exercise, it cannot escape involvement in the processes by which power is deployed." As these maps described the Sudan in increasingly precise detail, so too did their creators chart a more defined map of Egypt geographically, politically, and culturally. The process of conquering and studying the Sudan would create among Egyptians, by the last quarter of the century, a much stronger sense of the state and nation—of what Egypt meant. This small empire was drawn by its colonies.

This literature is important for its explo- ration of geographical knowledge and the processes by which power is enforced and represented in colonial encounters; but this literature remains situated in one definition of empire—European—which limits the defini- tion of geographical knowledge. Muhammad Alï's Egypt also experienced an exercise in imperial imagination, an exercise that proved to be highly influential on successive generations. Although ultimately Muhammad Alï's manpower and other resources proved far less effective than those of Great Britain or France, his attempts to colonize the Sudan had great impact on the future of the Nile Valley and on how Egyptians came to draw bound- aries in their sense of nationhood and nationalism.

The sojourn in the Sudan represented, in fact, the end of these great assignments; it was an exile imposed by Abbas I, Muhammad Alï's successor. Al-Tahtawï's influential views on the Sudan and the Sudanese reflect the changes in perception about that land that had occurred during the rule of Muhammad Alï and are, in many ways, a nar- ration of that ruler's colonial map. The writer Alï Mubärak represents an important bridge between men like al-Tunisï and al-Tahtawï and the next generation of nationalists to emerge in Egypt. Born twenty years after al- Tahtawï, Alï Mubärak would never have become a highly educated teacher and civil engineer had it not been for the secular schools created by Muhammad Alï. In an engineering curriculum, `Alï Mubärak found an intellectual freedom that his training at al-Azhär University—the premier Islamic university in Cairo—had not provided him.

Shaykh al-Tahtawï inherited his view of the Sudan and its people, who not only were burdened with the ages-old stereotype of them as wild and savage but also were the subjects of many explorations and studies and were conceptualized as a subject people. He was the most politicized of the four voyagers of this study, because of his particularly energetic participation in Muhammad `Alï's program of social reform for Egypt, and because of the perspectives about national community and identity that he gained from his experiences in France, which he promoted eloquently and forcefully in Egypt. From Paris, al-Tahtawï brought home a new lexicon to describe his own country, the most powerful being al-watan, his complicated word for the nation and its community and the bond that had to be forged between the two. His deep and abiding love for Egypt was rivaled only by his pro- found disgust with the Sudan and the Sudanese.

From Paris, al-Tahtawï brought home a new lexicon to describe his own country, the most powerful being al-watan, his complicated word for the nation and its community and the bond that had to be forged between the two. His deep and abiding love for Egypt was rivaled only by his pro- found disgust with the Sudan and the Sudanese. … His particular poem about the Sudan and its people also demon- strates how the process of colonialism and nationalism came to be racialized, and how an increasing sense of racial difference could be incorporated into a sense of political and cultural boundaries.

As this chapter shows, however, al-Tahtawï's perceptions were different from those of the other three writers, reflecting, I think, a hardening perspective of Egyptian intellectuals about the nature of Egyptian identity and its mea- sure against African societies. Racial differentiation sharply defined the con- trast between Egypt and others. Egyptian society was bound to the South both by memories of conquest and by increasing sensitivity to its own vul- nerability to western Europe.

As R. S. O'Fahey describes it, by the end of the seventeenth century the caravan route of darb al-arbaïn between Därfür and Assiout in Upper Egypt was well-established. The merchants regularly went back and forth across great distances of desert, and learned to find or create homes at either end of their journeys. In a way, this was true of the ulamä´ too. These were learned men who crossed the Islamic world in wide swathes from Mecca to West Africa, and who traveled to Därfür to work as judges or in other capacities for the sul- tan. Many of them came from North Africa,Arabia, or Egypt.They had cre- dentials from al-Azhär University and spoke an impressive classical Arabic that raised their importance in the eyes of the Fur sultans, who were them- selves looking to Islamize both court and country.

I know that the more cultivated, populated part of the northern country is the region of the Bartï and the Zaghawa, due to their sheer numbers. And notice the wisdom of God: the two tribes live on one land, but the Bartï are purer of heart and prettier of face, with more beautiful women: the Zaghawa are the opposite.

When Muhammad Alï assumed control of Egypt as walï, or viceroy, for the Ottoman Empire in 1805, the conditions that had enabled a merchant- voyager like Muhammad al-Tunisï to explore a more personal geography in the Sudan changed drastically. Muhammad Alï's ambition to expand the boundaries of the Ottoman province of Egypt fit a pattern of expansionism established by previous Ottoman governors, such as Alï Bey al-Kabïr in the eighteenth century. Unlike his predecessors, however, Muhammad Alï sought more than the quasi autonomy that came from occupying neigh- boring countries and controlling their trade routes through Egypt. As Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot describes it, Muhammad `Alï took Egypt steps toward seceding from the Ottoman Empire and becoming an independent empire on its own.

Muhammad Sabry, writing in 1930, resolved this ambiguity by effacing the "Turkish" nature of Muhammad `Alï's armies in the Sudan and identi- fying them as completely Egyptian. Sabry considers the invasion to have been an essential part of the walï's imperialistic ambitions; once the invasion was completed, he writes,"l'empire égyptien est, d'orès et déjà, constitué."

Robert Collins goes even further in his discussion of the significance of slavery in the Sudan campaign, saying that, although many men had been enlisted in Egyptian armies since the time of the Pharaohs, it was not until the conquest of the Sudan that “the slave trade became an organized function of an Oriental colonial government.”

And perhaps in response to Holt and Daly, Ramadan also discounts the idea that slavery attracted Muhammad Alï to the Sudan and that the invasion amplified the trade. Rather, the trade in slaves existed long before the Egyptians con- quered the Sudan, and that trade was only one of the resources Muham- mad Alï hoped to exploit. Finally, Ramadan negates the possibility of imperialism because, unlike in Europe, there was no bourgeoisie in Egypt, no class of capitalists who could really generate markets for Sudanese goods at the time of the invasion.

In a collection of articles he edited that debate the very use of the term impe- rialism in the context of the Nile Valley, Abd al-Azim Ramadan writes that this conquest was not an example of one foreign country’s raiding of another, like “England’s invasion of Egypt, or France’s invasion of Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco, or Italy’s invasion of Libya.” The conditions that characterized European imperialism were not present in the historical rela- tions between Egypt and the Sudan, or in the political culture of Egypt at this time. There was no sense of Egyptian identity—thus precluding the creation of the colonized Other in Egyptian society—nor was the Sudan a unified country (Därfür was not annexed until 1874).

Not all historians see Egypt's invasion of the Sudan as imperialism. In a collection of articles he edited that debate the very use of the term impe- rialism in the context of the Nile Valley, Abd al-Azim Ramadan writes that this conquest was not an example of one foreign country's raiding of another, like "England's invasion of Egypt, or France's invasion of Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco, or Italy's invasion of Libya." The conditions that characterized European imperialism were not present in the historical rela- tions between Egypt and the Sudan, or in the political culture of Egypt at this time. There was no sense of Egyptian identity—thus precluding the creation of the colonized Other in Egyptian society—nor was the Sudan a unified country (Därfür was not annexed until 1874).

This may seem strange, Bonola Bey conceded, yet he considered the situation understandable, given the political circumstances of Egypt upon Muhammad Alï’s ascension to power. As a result of the internecine wars that had ravaged Egypt in the aftermath of the French invasion (1798–1801), the new dynasty found that Egypt “had fallen into a state close to barbarity. The Egyptians, absorbed in the struggle of progres- sive transformation that was being accomplished under the power of their sovereigns, found themselves insufficiently prepared to undertake scientific explorations.” Because of this, Muhammad Alï sought recourse in the geographic experience of Europeans very early, one result of which was the first official map of Kordofan, in the western part of the Sudan, drawn by M. Ruppel in 1829.

But his employing a dependable Turkish-speaking naval officer known as Selim Qapudan to journey up the Nile to find its source also suggests that Muhammad `Alï hoped to diversify the group of people who were to categorize and classify the Sudan in his name.

Prior to Selim Qapudan’s trip, Muhammad Alï had tried to enlist his commander, or hikimdar, of the Sudan, Khurshid Pasha, to lead another expedition up the Nile. In a letter to Khurshid Pasha, Muhammad Alï wrote that “each of the greatest of men who have come to this world and then left it, left a trace on which their name lies, or their highest hopes, or their fame.” To that lofty end, he instructed Khurshid Pasha to prepare for the exploration of the Nile’s ori- gins, not only for the promise of promotion and personal fame this would guarantee Khurshid Pasha but also for Egypt, in its new state of “fluores- cence”: “It is incumbent upon you to extend the greatest of your efforts to heighten and augment her situation.”

What is incumbent upon you, Captain Selim, is to request whatever you need and all will be delivered to you. We are not going to these territo- ries as raiders or conquerors. Be judicious and offer gifts that would be worthy of me. Work hard to conciliate these uncivilized peoples [tilk al- shu`üb al-mutarbira] that you encounter. Attain their confidence and their affection with gifts that you present to their leaders. The soldiers will accompany you not to attack or to raid but to protect your welfare.

The historian Nissim Maqqar concludes that documents like the above affirm the scientific goals of the expedition: to bring home geographic knowledge of the White Nile and to civilize (tamdïn) the tribes and uncivi- lized groups living along the river. In many instances, Maqqar takes Muhammad `Alï at his word, but it may be helpful to problematize the word tamdïn, loaded with meanings that changed with every decade of the viceroy's reign.

For Selim Qapudan, the expedition had been sent by Muhammad Alï as a means of gathering information and offering the Nilotic tribes a glimpse of the civilization that was extending its authority over their territories. For the Shilluk and the Kik, it was an act of conquest by armed men sent with- out warning to their land by a nameless authority. For European geographers and scientists interested in the Nile Valley, it was a knowledge-seeking cam- paign that opened new pathways into the "mysteries of Africa." And for Muhammad Alï, the real author of the expedition, it was a gesture that would dignify Egyptian control of the Nile Valley with European ideals about the values and uses of such scientific information.

Too often scholars of nationalism and imperialism collapse the historical complexities into overly simplistic theoretical binary relationships such as colonizer/colonized. This particular moment in 1840 shows Egypt standing at empire’s edge, where meanings of empire were no longer being formed in the Ottoman model, but along a new European pattern. In the Egyptian case, the word imperialism fits this temporal limbo; this imperialism was embarked upon in the name of a future state. Selim Qapudan’s expedition fit into this desired legacy, a projection of Egypt into the future, the making of a nation whose geographic and cultural shape would emerge from its imperial extensions.

It is universally recognized among scholars of Egyptian his- tory and literature that al-Tahtawï was the originator of the concept watan (nation, patrie) in Egyptian society and the first to articulate a sense of Egypt as a culturally and politically unified community. In his important historical works, al-Tahtawï’s emerging sense of nationalism helped create a map of Egyptian civilization. For the purpose of this study, two factors make al-Tahtawï’s literary mapping interesting: his idealization of the Sudan as a conquered and dependent territory whose resources could help Egypt achieve Muhammad `Alï’s goals, and his horror of the Sudan itself, when he was sent to live in Khartoum in 1850, eight years after Selim Qapudan had completed his final expedition up the Nile.

Born in 1801, al-Tahtawï came from a family from Upper Egypt. He began his intellectual career at al-Azhär University when he was sixteen years old. He studied there with Shaykh Hassan al-Attar, one of the first Egyptian scholars to engage the French sciences at Napoleon’s Institut d’Égypte. Nine years later, al-Tahtawï was appointed the imam of the first delegation of students that Muhammad Alï sent to Paris in 1826. Al- Tahtawï stayed there for five years, learning French and the art of transla- tion and, with these skills, delving deeply into ancient history, philosophy, and French literature. Upon returning to Egypt, he published a description of Paris, the celebrated Takhlïs al-ibriz fï talkhïs Bärïz (Refinement of Pure Gold in the Summary of Paris). Soon Muhammad `Alï appointed him the director of the new School of Languages, an institution created to train Egyptian students for new secular professions.

The Sudan constituted another, crucial aspect of the bridge being con- structed by al-Tahtawï in the service of Muhammad Alï and his successors. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Egyptian rule in the Sudan was changing.After twelve years (1826–1838) of effective administration on the part of Khurshid Pasha (the hikimdar of the Sudan, who Muhammad Alï had encouraged to make the expedition that eventually was completed by Selim Qapudan), Khartoum had transformed into a city: an international community of merchants had settled there, as had the consuls of European governments; permanent barracks for the military had been constructed and dockyards built along the Nile. By 1842, the Egyptian administration extended to the ports of Suakin and Massawa, thus reaching as far as the Red Sea coast, and, thanks to Selim Qapudan, a route was opened up to the southern Sudan along the White Nile.

The reassertion of Egyptian power in the Sudan, it is suggested, should be seen also within an Ottoman-Egyptian context. That is, as part of the emerging identity of the elite, as it was trying to negotiate a regional role for the autonomous, though still Ottoman, Egypt. This is what I termed the notion of "mini-empire."

In other words, the Sudan helped Egyptians identify what was Egyptian about Egypt, in an idealized, burgeoning nationalist sense; yet one's presence in the Sudan was an exile, a detachment from home in Egypt, a disgrace.

Wendell calls this a "unified picture of Egypt's man- ifest destiny in Africa." He states that,"as one of the civilized nations of the world, Egypt takes her place alongside Europe, and the less developed peo- ples of the southern Sudan especially, are held up to criticism as examples of improvidence, shiftlessness, and technical and social backwardness." So, in its passivity as the object of Egyptian imperialism, the Sudan played a cru- cial role in helping Egyptians define and maintain their cultural, historical, political, economic, and geographic integrity. The dreamed-of Egypt, in its active domination of the Sudan, was therefore as much an ancient state as it was a state that would be realized in the future, when it was to achieve par- ity with Europe. A new geography was created, based on measurements of time and development.

Al-Tahtawï also wished for the extraction of the Sudan's mineral re- sources, particularly its fabled gold deposits, to help Egypt gain entry into the international metals market, then dominated by Russia, Austria, and South America.

In al-Tahtawï's book, the Sudanese were ultimately most important as targets of Egyptian colonialism. After his return to Egypt from the Sudan, Muhammad `Alï began to bring the children of Sudanese shaykhs and lead- ers to Cairo, to educate them in the basics of agriculture or in the language schools.The point of this, wrote al-Tahtawï, was "to give them a taste of the food of learning and civilization, so that they could then spread this in their country." As they became increasingly "civilized," these Sudanese children offered proof of Egypt's political and cultural hegemony. Upon them was written the text, therefore, of Egyptian achievement.

In al-Tahtawï's book, the Sudanese were ultimately most important as targets of Egyptian colonialism. … As he described it, half of its inhabitants were like beasts and others like stones.The men of the Sudan forced their women into pros- titution, and they accepted the progeny of these unions, despite the prohi- bition of Islamic law. They taught the women to fornicate like beasts. If it had not been for the white Arabs—law la al-bayda min al-`arab la känu— they would have been blacker and blacker and blacker, nothing but black- ness—sawädan fï sawädin fï sawädin.

His personal sense of geography was striking: the Sudan, he states, when one is actually living there, does not at all feel like a part of Egypt.Al-Tahtawï felt himself terribly oppressed in his exile so far from home, living near peo- ple who were basically inanimate objects or wild barbarians to him, unable or unwilling to participate in the culture that al-Tahtawï had brought with him. But his sense of nationalist connection to Egypt was powerful enough for him to argue that bringing the Sudan closer into the Egyptian sphere created one country, with links to both the glories of the ancient Egyptian past and the future power of Europe. Still, the Sudan never felt like home.

If the Sudan crystallized into a racially inferior but absolutely necessary colony of Egypt for al-Tahtawï, Alï Mubärak saw it as a landscape of savagery, but one whose immaturity represented a past only recently shared by Egypt.The connection was much more intimate. For Mubärak, the alleged practices and customs of Africans and the Sudanese were not unlike those of pre-Islamic Arabs. Within them lay as much potential and possibility as in any child. When he wrote about the Sudan and Africa in his fictional narrative Alam al-Dïn in 1857, it was with an almost Montesquieu-like empathy. But the Sudan served also as a warning: Egypt had to beware that, unless it actively pursued knowledge of the outside world, it would be as easily marginalized and as vulnerable as he considered the Sudan to be.

If the Sudan crystallized into a racially inferior but absolutely necessary colony of Egypt for al-Tahtawï, `Alï Mubärak saw it as a landscape of savagery, but one whose immaturity represented a past only recently shared by Egypt.The connection was much more intimate. For Mubärak, the alleged practices and customs of Africans and the Sudanese were not unlike those of pre-Islamic Arabs. Within them lay as much potential and possibility as in any child.

Very much to Alï Mubärak's surprise, the high-ranking commissioner, Anbar Effendi, was black. In his own words, `Alï Mubärak could not wrap his mind around this inversion of social and cultural hierarchies: I looked at him and saw that he was black, Abyssinian, as if he were a Mamluk's slave. Yet he was both magnanimous and dignified. I saw how the shaykhs and judges of the area stood before him, and how he coun- seled them. I stayed around until they had gone, and then entered his chamber and kissed his hand. … I had always thought that the ruling classes only included Turks; this was the custom during those days. So, I remained shocked and confused that these dignitaries stood before a slave and kissed his hand.

Wadad al-Qadi convincingly argues that this narrative fits into a genre of “the Arab rediscovery of Europe—books quite in fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century,” as the success of al-Tahtawï’s Takhlïs al-ibriz in 1834 had shown.

No wonder, then, that travel to Africa takes on such mythical status in this book, idealized to the point of legend. Alï Mubärak never traveled to Africa, and so the two hundred or so pages devoted to the continent are a story of shipwreck and adventure, as told to the Egyptian characters by a young British sailor named James (Yaqüb), whom they encounter in Marseilles.

Though this ruler did employ certain native-born Egyptians like Mubärak and al-Tahtawï as part of his effort to redefine Egypt as a political entity, he relied strongly on a bureaucratic system in which "access to the centre of power was determined by origin, personal connections and relations with the dynasty" of his grandfather, Muhammad Alï. Egyptians only rarely joined the ranks of the ruling classes of Ottoman Egyptians, and when they did, they were "confined to jobs for which, according to Ismaïl, they showed special aptitude." Isma`ïl's discriminatory dreams would raise the issue of who should lead Egypt, while his expan- sionism into Africa would raise the issue of what form of the Egyptian empire should take. Ironically, both would provoke rebellions.

But though he was ready to extend Egypt's reach into Africa, Ismaïl could not afford to be brash in disclosing his ambition. He told British diplomats that his intentions for Africa were not imperial but were of a reformist nature: to end the trade in slaves and to open new forms of trade with the East African heartland, thus civilizing peoples long excluded from international markets. But in the eyes of many British observers, particularly members of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Ismaïl's attempts at empire represented no civilizing mission, no opening of the dark continent to free trade, but instead were an extension of what seemed to them the notori- ously despotic rule of Islam. For these abolitionists, a religion that sanc- tioned the seclusion of women and the trading of slaves could never encour- age progress among other peoples.

The farther south Ismaïl moved, therefore, the more vigilant the influ- ential members of the Anti-Slavery Society became. Not only did they peti- tion the khedive directly to abolish the slave trade, but they also had the ear of many individuals in Parliament and the Foreign Office. So loud were their voices that, by 1877, Ismaïl signed the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention.

Isma`ïl then decided that the employment of British officials in the Egyptian administration of the Sudan would silence his doubters in Exeter Hall, the London headquarters of the Anti-Slavery Society, and add the desired legitimacy to his consolidation of the Nile Valley.

Ismaïl paid 130 million francs for this right. The many miles of railway and canals were built at tremendous expense, and Ismaïl borrowed heavily, on unfavorable terms, from British, French, and German banks.

On this issue, Sanü`a best expressed the idea that Egypt was a part of three empires—the Ottoman Empire, the British empire, and its own domestic empire in the Sudan—although all four writers conveyed a sense of this division of empire in their work.

Sanüa was born into a well-educated Jewish family in 1839. As a child he was edu- cated in both Hebrew and Arabic. Reportedly very precocious, he impressed a member of the royal family with his intelligence and his gift for languages and was sent to Italy to study. Soon after his return to Egypt, his father died, and he was compelled to take a job as a tutor to children of the relatives of Viceroy Muhammad Alï. In 1863, the same year that Ismaïl became ruler of Egypt, Sanüa began teaching at the Polytechnic School, one of Muhammad `Alï’s original schools, which was organized on a European curriculum to educate soldiers and officers of the Egyptian army.

Sanüa lost the khedive’s support in 1872.25 He then founded two literary groups: Mahfil al-taqaddum (the Circle of Progress), followed by Jamat Muhibbi al-ilm (The Society of Lovers of Knowledge). Both were dedicated to intellectual discussions among Egyptians, no matter their religion. Reformist-minded ulamä´ from al- Azhär joined, as did officers of the army. But these societies were short- lived.The khedive closed them in 1874, even exiling some of their members to the south of the Sudan.

Although Sanü`a was fiercely critical of Great Britain’s imperialism in India and feared the same fate for Egypt, his work reveals an intimate empire, in which the Sudanese were the servants, guards, and doorkeepers of Egyptian society. Although the Sudan itself was depicted as a wild and untamed land, Sudanese residents in Egypt were often portrayed as docile, fearful, and in need of Egyptian guidance.

Drawn upon the famil- iar lines of Sudanese and Nubians represented in early Egyptian drama, this Nubian buffoon’s fears and mispronunciations made him a sympa- thetic, unthreatening, and infantile character for Egyptians, a comfortable gatekeeper of domestic life during a time of great political upheaval.

Sanüa recognized the importance of the Mahdïya, but he misjudged how deep a blow the Mahdïya’s success was to Egyptian nationalism. And though the Mahdï’s rebellion shrank Egypt’s borders (both imagined and physical), Sanüa saw the Mahdï as an ally in the Egyptian struggle against the increasing British presence, a presence he considered to be a direct challenge to Egyptian polit- ical aspirations. He wrote many articles about the Sudan and Egypt joining together to defeat their common enemy, misinterpreting the message of the Mahdï’s revolution completely.

But the majority of Egyptians do not seem to have seen the Sudanese or Nubians beyond this iconographic level, as the experiences of Nubian traders and guild members attested to in the late 1870s. Many of these men found that the Egyptian guilds discriminated against them, and they made their own appeals for independent guilds, so difficult was their integration.

The idea emerged, powerfully, that the Sudanese benefited from crossing over into Egyptian culture, and that the civilizing hand of the Egyptian government would tame the awesome terri- tory of the Sudan itself. After 1882, the failure of `Uräbï's forces and the British occupation occurred within the context of the European scramble for Africa, a context about which Egyptians were growing more aware thanks to the spread of newspapers and journals in their country. A third, disquiet- ing element entered Egyptians' ideas of territorial conquest in Africa. This was the uncomfortable realization that, in the eyes of western European cul- ture, Egypt stood somewhere closer to Africa than to Europe when mea- sured on a scale that calibrated the achievements of each civilization, and that Egypt was just as vulnerable to conquest and colonization as the Sudan.

A third, disquiet- ing element entered Egyptians' ideas of territorial conquest in Africa. This was the uncomfortable realization that, in the eyes of western European cul- ture, Egypt stood somewhere closer to Africa than to Europe when mea- sured on a scale that calibrated the achievements of each civilization, and that Egypt was just as vulnerable to conquest and colonization as the Sudan. Against this tense and conflicted background, Egyptian writers and politi- cians labored to assert Egypt's separateness from such vulnerability in their descriptions and characterizations of their own society. … And this sense of European menace enshrined the important contradiction of Egyptian nationalism: the fight against European imperialism that marched hand-in- hand with the fight to regain imperial control of the Sudan.

And this sense of European menace enshrined the important contradiction of Egyptian nationalism: the fight against European imperialism that marched hand-in- hand with the fight to regain imperial control of the Sudan.

Under these pressures, Egyptians tried to identify what they valued in their cultural and political lives, as well as what had to be reformed. This required naming Egyptian culture: what was indigenous and what was for- eign, what was “national” and what was alien. As Benedict Anderson describes it, Egyptians in the 1870s were beginning the process of imagin- ing their community, and they were using newspapers, short stories, and plays to do it. These became tools with which to create identifiably Egyp- tian characters, whose accents, expressions, and circumstances—though usually rendered in symbolic, almost stereotypic, terms—became emblems of Egyptian social and cultural unity. … But differing somewhat from writers of other cultures included in Anderson’s brilliant presentation of the birth of literature among colonized peoples of the nineteenth century, Egyptian writers existed in a greater colonialist limbo: not yet independent from the Ottoman Empire, but not quite colonized by Great Britain. Furthermore, Anderson posits that this adoption of print media was an expression of cul- tural revolution and anti-imperialism among the colonized. In Egypt, how- ever, the artists and writers who were helping to fashion this imagined com- munity were themselves parading Egyptian society along a very traditional stage. Their characters were locked into a recognizable series of linguistic, stereotypical tics. Perhaps this made it easier for them to be imagined.

But differing somewhat from writers of other cultures included in Anderson's brilliant presentation of the birth of literature among colonized peoples of the nineteenth century, Egyptian writers existed in a greater colonialist limbo: not yet independent from the Ottoman Empire, but not quite colonized by Great Britain.

Sanüa first expressed his sense of Egyptian identity in his plays.Though far from being the first to introduce drama to Egyptian audiences, he was the first to set his plays in Egyptian households, with characters speaking in the everyday rhythms of colloquial Arabic. In this way, Egypt, or more par- ticularly, Cairo, becomes the backdrop against which Sanüa presented Egyptians with an image of themselves. … Sanüa created characters out of recognizable characteristics, some that the audience would find endearingly familiar, others that symbolized foreigners.These types fit into a social niche, particularly the Sudanese; through the proverbs and jokes his characters make about them, Sanüa offers a glimpse into where the Sudanese fit in the domestic, everyday life of Cairene society.

Sanü`a used his plays to criticize what he saw as the deterioration of val- ues and respect for others in Egyptian life, and was especially bitter about the greed exhibited by the members of Cairo’s ruling class, those who exploited the peasant and who imitated too well the avarice of European financiers.

The subtlety of this humor emerges in the fact that this is an Egyptian peas- ant imitating the accent of the Sudanese. … As Jacob Landau and others note in their analyses of early Egyptian drama, the strangeness of an accent, in Arabic, delineated the degree of foreignness of the speaking character. Images of Turkish-speaking pashas were always good for a laugh,especially when they stumbled through the col- loquial Arabic of Egypt as they tried to issue orders to the subject class of the fallahïn. This situation represented an ironic view of the unsuitability of the pashas as rulers that resulted from their linguistic distance from Egyptian cul- ture. Accents provided a social map of all classes. The mistakes characters made, the vocabulary they used, all worked to distinguish them on a social, economic, national, ethnic, and racial scale.

There is an interesting uneasiness about economic and political power within Sanüa’s humorous linguistic depictions. Both the Ottoman elite and the British officials are cut down to size by their accents and grammatical mistakes when speaking in colloquial Arabic, and they are further humili- ated by the witty asides of the Egyptian characters confronting them. … Egyptians may not have been at the source of economic and political power in their society, but Sanüa’s assertion of linguistic dominance shows where cultural power lay. The Egyptian characters are thus able to under- mine foreign domination of their society.Yet, in a fascinating exercise of lin- guistic anxiety, they undermine the dominance of others only by imitating and mocking the speech of authority.

Sanüa clearly defines who is an Egyptian by the way his characters speak, but he is not as clear when it comes to the Sudanese or Nubians. In plays and other representations of the time, the Sudanese were just as con- stant a source of laughter when they spoke. But with the Sudanese, many of whom spoke Arabic as their native tongue, the linguistic stereotyping as- sumes another dimension in assertions of Egyptian authority. … There emerges, then, a linguistic tutorial between Egyptian and Nubian in Sanüa’s work, in which the Egyptian instructs the latter in how to speak his native tongue. The lessons are dictated by educated, middle- to upper-class Egyptians. This tutorial reinforces the intimate ties between Egyptian and Sudanese cultures while also repeating the pattern and goals of domination established by both the khedive’s foreign policy and the traditional employment of the Sudanese as servants in Egyptian homes. … Just as interesting is his attribution of the Nubian’s arrogance to the gentlemen (khawajät) who “spoil” people like him, elevating them to positions for which Faraj perhaps sees himself better suited, which calls to mind the mis- sion of civilizing the Sudan assumed by the Egyptian government.

Ismaïl closed Sanüa's theater in 1872, either out of sensitivity to what he perceived to be the social criticism inherent in Sanüa's work, or under direct pressure from English officials angry with Sanüa's profoundly anti-British stance. But as mentioned earlier, Sanüa's political activism only increased: he founded two secret societies in 1873 and 1874. When the secret societies were closed by Ismaïl, the journal Abü Nazzara Zarqa became Sanü`a's loud- est political instrument.

It seems clearer here, though, that Khulkhäl Aga is as much a victim of the Ottoman ruling class as any Egyptian: he lost his manhood and is thus symbolic of Egyptians' own inability to gain autonomy in the government that ruled them.

Khulkhäl Aga, who appears in several other sketches, is the supreme gatekeeper and guardian of that most intimate part of the khedive's life, just as Abü Rida performs the duties that keep Sitt Banbah's household running. But Khulkhäl Aga also offers Sanü`a's audience insights into the outer peripheries of Egypt's borders, because, with his amputation, he personifies the very act of conquest of the Sudan. It seems clearer here, though, that Khulkhäl Aga is as much a victim of the Ottoman ruling class as any Egyptian: he lost his manhood and is thus symbolic of Egyptians' own inability to gain autonomy in the government that ruled them.

Sad attributes his limited resources and the color of his sons to his wife; in doing so, Sad provides a glimpse of the hierarchy of color that existed in the army and in the levels of authority. Historically, Circassian children, sold by their parents to the Ottomans in the system known as devshirme, were raised to become members of the ruling class; hence they were considered to be more valuable, and cost more than darker children, who would be groomed only as slaves or servants.

Once out of Egypt, Sanü`a could write with even greater impunity about Egyptian politics. His journals gained notoriety.With the most famous and popular practitioner of the new political journalism now out of his control, the khedive found that his repressive acts and taxes became more transparent. Moreover, Egyptians became aware of his increasing loss of financial control of his country, the humiliation of the government's declaration of bankruptcy in 1875, and British and French officials' formal assumption of control of Egypt's trea- sury, with the creation of the Caisse de la Dette Publique in 1878.

The Mahdï’s humble origins thus enable him, in Sanüa’s construction, to be even more the embodiment of a divine miracle that revolutionizes the con- fining social constructions resulting from British imperialism. … Sanüa, unlike the more skeptical al- Afghänï, accepts Muhammad Ahmad’s efforts to change the Sudan spiritu- ally. He refers to him as the Mahdï, which al-Afghänï never did, and he himself cloaks all descriptions of Muhammad Ahmad in religious terms, often in classical Arabic.

Ironically, into this realm of traditional and unquestioning adherence to religious authority stepped a number of Sanüa’s old colleagues and fellow Urabists, many of whom, he and other sources claim, joined the Mahdïya after their defeat at Tel al-Kabïr in 1883.

Even though the Mahdï was portrayed as more admirable, virile, and eloquent, he stood as stead- fastly against the door, protecting Egyptians, as had Sanü`a's earlier charac- ter, Muhammad the Nubian.

Khedive Ismaïl's ambitious and optimistic project to reorder Egyptian soci- ety also extended to the Sudan, with consequences as profound as those that so alarmed Yaqüb Sanüa and Abdallah al-Nadïm. In the words of P. M. Holt, the Egyptian administration of the Sudan made it "the first region in the interior of Africa to experience (although at one remove) the tensions characteristic of Western colonialism."1 These tensions, which Holt charac- terizes as a "general incompatibility between Sudanese traditional society and the new model derived ultimately from Europe" caused a social and political upheaval that was eventually "resolved" in the Mahdïya.

Although the Mahdï denounced the Turkïya as a tyrannical administra- tion, many Sudanese traders and sometimes entire northern tribes benefited from it. Notable among these were the Jaaliyün, the Danäqla, and the Shayqïya. There were Sudanese individuals who profited enormously from the changes wrought by the administration, like the Jaalï trader al-Zubayr Rahman Pasha Mansur, who eventually became governor of Därfür, and Ahmad Bey `Awad al-Karïm Abu Sinn, who served as governor of Khartoum from 1860 to 1870.

For many in Egypt before the Mahdïya, the Sudan had long been a remote place of exile, a natural prison for the disgraced. For Egyptian sol- diers however, the Sudan often represented chances for promotion, rare enough in the military establishment run by Ottoman Egyptians during the reign of Khedive Ismaïl. After the defeat of the Uräbï rebellion, many Egyptian soldiers who had been loyal to the colonel defected from the Egyptian army and joined the growing forces of the Mahdï.

There were Egyptians, however, who responded to Isma`ïl’s dreams of expansion and wished to overcome their lack of representation in the scram- ble for Africa, hoping to assert themselves in the arena of empire building.

Although he strongly protested the British occupation of Egypt, Fawzï believed fully in the idea of a hierarchy of civilizations in the world of the late nineteenth century, according to which schema the advanced cultures bore both the right and the responsibility to colonize and “civilize” societies considered less developed. In Fawzï’s perception, the acts of empire united a culture and made it a nation; the agents of his empire were therefore Egyptians, native-born and nationalist-minded. … Ibrahïm Fawzï was an enforcer of colonialism in the Sudan and a colonized subject at home in Cairo. His memoirs offer a unique glimpse into one patriot who could attempt to bridge the contradictions of early Egyptian nationalism.

Although he strongly protested the British occupation of Egypt, Fawzï believed fully in the idea of a hierarchy of civilizations in the world of the late nineteenth century, according to which schema the advanced cultures bore both the right and the responsibility to colonize and “civilize” societies considered less developed. In Fawzï's perception, the acts of empire united a culture and made it a nation; the agents of his empire were therefore Egyptians, native-born and nationalist-minded. His two-volume work waved the flag of Egypt with as much flourish as any official institute, and perhaps no other monument or text better represents the conflicts of iden- tity that shaped Egyptian nationalists. Ibrahïm Fawzï was an enforcer of colonialism in the Sudan and a colonized subject at home in Cairo.

After the trials of the Uräbï rebellion were over, Uräbï and his six closest associates were sentenced to exile in Ceylon.The punishment for many of the soldiers of lesser rank who had participated in the rebellion was reassignment to the Sudan to fight the Mahdï (a fate considered by many to be equal to capital punishment).

These soldiers were rarely men of letters. Unlike the beliefs of nationalist writers and publicists Yaqüb Sanüa and Abdallah al-Nadïm, or the newspaper editor Alï Yusuf who wrote pages and pages on the issue of the Sudan and its meaning for Egypt, the soldiers’ perspectives on the Egyptian experience in the Sudan remained a subject for letters sent home. The living military memory of the Sudan circulated, but only privately, until Ibrahïm Fawzï published his memoirs.

Gordon replaced him immediately with a German convert to Islam known as Emin Pasha, a man that Fawzï and other officers, including Europeans, suspected of conspiring with another German doctor in Gordon’s favor to arrange Fawzï’s dismissal. This ouster infuriated and humiliated Fawzï, who felt he had performed well as governor and had intimate knowledge of the customs of the tribes of the Equatorial Provinces. Even more humiliating, Gordon had not taken him at his word but had instead been swayed by other Europeans.

This issue of rank for Fawzï arose at a particularly sensitive time in Egyptian politics: Egyptian officers like Ibrahïm Fawzï had grown more des- perate and frustrated at the refusal of ethnic Circassian administrators to promote them. The military grades that were equated with the social ranks of pasha and bey were intended almost exclusively for Circassians, and Egyptians claiming these titles met with arrogance and condescension, as Fawzï related when he returned to the War Ministry in 1879:

For about five years, no one in Cairo knew if Fawzï was dead or alive. This purgatory of official existence made life very difficult for the families of officers like Fawzï, because without proof of their loved ones' survival, the Ministry of Finance paid them lower pensions and benefits.

But other Europeans involved in service in the Sudan or in Egypt respected Fawzï immensely. In the fearful and anxious days after the British bombardment of Alexandria, when Egyptian soldiers following `Uräbï were almost at fever pitch, Europeans unsympathetic to the rebellion were impressed by Fawzï's ability to keep Cairo secure and calm.

Flora Shaw, a British journalist, conducted a series of interviews with al- Zubayr in 1887 that were published in English in the journal Contemporary Review. Interestingly, Shaw was the wife of Lord Frederick Lugard, the British officer who helped establish colonial rule over Nigeria and much of central Africa (for example, Uganda, not far from al-Zubayr's Sudan).

This description also shows the parallels between al- Zubayr Pasha and Ibrahïm Fawzï, who was himself caught in a triangle of loyalties and allegiances, whose abilities were quite singular, and who also used a prison setting to discuss the nature of governmental power and the meaning of colonialism.

Mtesa's forceful message was only a smokescreen; he per- mitted Gordon and the army to finish the way station, and he allowed the villagers to trade freely with the Egyptian soldiers. When the outpost was finished, the army hoisted the Egyptian flag over it, then shot off a twenty- one-gun salute "announcing the conquest of this district. With regard to all this, Mtesa displayed affection and friendship to Gordon, and said to us,'We are one hand, and I derive my strength from the Egyptian government, which extends my authority over the governed, for their security and wel- fare.'"50

Fawzï refers to them as the "occupying army" [(jaysh al-ihtiläl]. This term further dis- tances Fawzï from a government in which he had no faith and to which he felt little loyalty. Clearly, without Gordon's interceding letter, the khedive would never have reinstated Fawzï Pasha in the army, and without Gordon, Fawzï Pasha would have had no status. On the other hand, Fawzï resented the British army as an occupying force even as he traveled with one of the highest ranking British officers in Egypt. His text thus shows that Fawzï Pasha lived these years on the brink, his loyalties and allegiances so divided and confused that he could spend months in jail, unrepentant over his protest against Tawfïq's capitulations to the British administrators in the occupying government, yet sail off to the Sudan with Gordon, grateful to return to a land that, in his firm opinion, required civilizing.

When the long-awaited rescuers finally came, they carried the ambiguous flag of the "Anglo-Egyptian" forces led by General Kitchener (it should also be remembered, however, that political hesitation in London prevented the forces of his majesty's gov- ernment from arriving on time to rescue Gordon from the Mahdï's armies).

In his writings, all that linked the numer- ous tribes of the Sudan were his description of these un-Islamic customs, making the Muslim northerners as ignorant of religion as the pagan south- ern tribes, rendering the entire Sudan as needful of Egyptian control. If fathers do not protect their daughters, if family honor bears no significance, then, according to Fawzï, Sudanese women amount to little more than pros- titutes or slaves. Thus, the Sudanese would never know exactly who they were without Egyptian cultural intervention. Here, Fawzï reveals his pro- found sympathy to British definitions of a nation and to the prevailing arguments for the cohesion that imperialism could offer weaker societies.

There were strong connections between Ibrahïm Fawzï and the Sudanese: Arabic was the native tongue and Islam the religion of both. His Sudanese contemporaries in Omdurman were as aware as he was of the traditional hierarchy of status long played out in the relationship between Egyptians and Sudanese. When the khalifa relegated him to the status of a servant, even a slave, it deeply bruised Fawzï’s acute sensitivity to rank and self-esteem.

In the act of writing about it, however, Fawzï Pasha responded inge- niously to this indignity. With his customary habit of ventriloquism, Fawzï affirmed his cultural identity with greater subtlety; his assertion of himself as an Egyptian of high rank comes from the mouths of the Sudanese. In Fawzï’s frame of reference, black skin is closely associated with slavery. By making the black Sudanese paint him as foreign, linked with the white Europeans, he preserved his natural rank as master, for him and his readers.

The debate about the experience of African slaves also aggravated an increasingly bitter controversy over the relationship between Egypt and its former colony, the Sudan.This controversy arose as the Mahdist state itself weakened and then fell to the British-led Egyptian armies in 1898. Not long after General Herbert Kitchener liberated hundreds of prisoners of the Mahdï, including Fawzï Pasha, the Sudan was named the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, a unique designation under which a British administrator would govern the Sudan and the Egyptian treasury would finance the ter- ritory. The British and Egyptian flags flew side-by-side over administrative buildings in Khartoum, but it was clear to most that the so-called condo- minium paid only sanctimonious attention to Egyptian claims to the Sudan.

As Ehud Toledano has noted, this narrow definition was met with an equally oversimplified response from Ottoman statesmen and writers. These elites countered that "kul/harem," or domestic slavery, was a considerably milder forms of the institution; in so doing, they ignored the more difficult circumstances of domestic slavery in which the majority of slaves were African. Nor did they account for the violent uprooting and harrowing migrations of these slaves' middle passage from Africa to the Ottoman provinces or to Istanbul.

Much of the success of the abolitionist movement was due to its religion-based indignation over the enslavement of blacks, in which abolitionist leaders were able to define slavery as a vio- lation of universal human rights. But as difficult a struggle as that had been within the British empire, exposure to Ottoman slavery presented British observers with a different and more complicated version of a trade and an institution that was multiracial, multiethnic, and generally domestic. For many in Great Britain, these differences made little sense, or even little dif- ference, and the cruel circumstances of Caribbean and American plantation slavery that informed British commentators' definitions of slavery framed their perspective on domestic slavery, concubinage, and military slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

Many took pride in direct descent from slaves, a claim that became easier to make as more and more Egyptians entered the ranks of the elite and thus were able to marry (or were given in marriage) the freed slave-women of the Ottoman-Egyptian ruling classes, who were considered to be members of the nobility. There was thus honor and social mobility inherent in the intermarriage between women of the Ottoman-Egyptian households and ambitious Egyptians, demonstrating that a certain kind of slavery led to social mobility. This also created a level of society whose members were half Egyptian and half Circassian, like the lawyer and states- man Ahmad Shafïk.

Toledano writes that, by the 1870s, "patriotic, Westernized Ottomans were torn between a growing rejection of slavery and a deep attachment to their sociocultural heritage, of which they remained proud. They tried hard to reconcile the conflict between a system in which they were born and raised—often by mothers, wet nurses, nannies, and female relatives of slave origins—and the demands and principles of a foreign culture they grew to respect, wanted to acquire, and wished to be recognized by as equals." Many Egyptians felt this con- flict, which was exacerbated by the British occupation and the deepening of Egyptian nationalism.

Looking at the presence of slaves within their own homes or in the households of friends and relatives,"they could pretend that this was where slavery actually began and that what had happened before belonged to another world—uncivilized, unruly, beyond their control." Toledano is describing in this sentence the feelings of Ottomans, but the question of whether that other African "world," from which many slaves came, was beyond control was problematic in the wake of Egyptian claims to the Sudan and its painful loss to the Mahdïya. And this African "world" could easily be blamed for the existence of slavery, for creating a cultureless vulnerability and lack of family structure, and even, it seemed, for going to war in order to defend the right to slavery.

Ismä`ïl's efforts to expand Egyptian authority beyond the source of the Nile into East Africa coincided with the close attention that British abolitionists were pay- ing to the trade in African slaves. Imperialism, nationalism, and abolitionism found yet another location to fight for: the Nile Valley.

In Great Britain, the abolitionists were aided by a tight network of infor- mation about Africa that was fed through cooperation between the Royal Geographic Society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the Church Missionary Society. Explorers like Dr. David Livingstone, John H. Speke, James Grant, Charles Gordon, and Samuel Baker became celebrated experts of the Royal Geographic Society for the firsthand information they brought or sent home from the Nile Valley or Lake Victoria. Their stories about the victimization of innocents that slavery wrought inspired both Protestant and Catholic missionaries to set up stations in different parts of the African heartland. Sketches they sent home of enslaved Africans encouraged the urgent appeals of the Anti-Slavery Society and were reprinted in news- papers, giving readers opportunities to view the human face of slavery.

It was a tremendous and evocative human rights campaign that shaped the view of Africa for much of the British public. Many people gained what little they knew about Africans from the writings of Livingstone, the explorer and missionary who so carefully and passionately related his expe- rience of the slave trade and thus contributed profoundly to the Anti- Slavery Society's campaign in East Africa.

Livingstone was unimpressed with arguments that Islam had brought education, morality, and civilization to eastern and central Africa. He was struck by what he considered an absence of Muslim missionary activity among the pagan Africans, and wondered at the missed opportunity this lack of proselytizing created. He wrote in his diary, "As they [the Arabs] never translate the Koran, they neglect the best means of influencing the Africans, who invariably wish to understand what they are about."

These ideas gained widespread currency in England, particularly at a time when few traveled to Africa itself. For the newspaper-reading public in both Europe and Egypt, for visitors to the free lectures at geographic societies, or for strollers through the exotic panoramas of international world exhibi- tions, central and East African territories unofficially bore the imprint of Livingstone's illustrious name and reputation.

But Egyptian or Muslim figures whose names were connected to sub-Saharan Africa were not similarly monumentalized as explorers and liberators of Africa, and were almost always implicated as agents in the slave trade. A national hero to many Egyptians, Fawzï could never shake off the stigma of his having traded in slaves when governor of Equatoria; this fact made him as repre- hensible to British authorities as his participation in the `Uräbï rebellion and kept him from gaining the back pay he had accrued while a prisoner in the Sudan.

The members of the Society were also well aware that they had public opinion on their side. The pressure they exerted, which often had the sup- port of members of Parliament, resulted in the Anglo-Egyptian Convention of 1877, which abolished the trade in African slaves in all territory held by the Egyptian government, although it did not outlaw the institution of slav- ery itself. The Anti-Slavery Convention was posted by decree throughout Egypt's cities and the Sudan, and allowed for the creation of slave trade bureaus in Cairo, Alexandria, the Delta, and Upper Egypt.

The Anti-Slavery Convention may have provided a clear date from which the trade in slaves was no longer permissible, but it left open wide- ranging and important questions about the nature of the trade in Egypt. It also created a very thick wall: on one side stood the British officials of the occupation, who were quickly coming to believe that a proslavery solidarity existed among the Muslims of Egypt, and that any Egyptian who supported the officials of the slave trade bureaus would be considered a traitor by other Egyptians. On the other side of the wall stood the majority of Egyp- tians, who saw slaves as closely connected to their households and often treated them as part of their families, and who believed that the more gen- tle domestic bondage of Egypt actually benefited the slaves themselves.

Then there were those who were deeply ambivalent about slavery yet who considered the officials of the slave trade bureaus to be trespassers broach- ing the privacy of the Egyptian family and revealing its secrets to the out- side world. This sense of invaded privacy put on the defensive those nationalists who called for the reconquest of the Sudan, because the British authorities in Egypt and participants in the antislavery movement in England heard with suspicion the nationalists' rhetoric that linked the Sudan corporeally to Egypt and interpreted such calls as defenses of slavery.

The nature of the slavery lived by black men and women in Egypt in the nineteenth century is rarely if ever discussed without being compared to the searing experiences of African slaves in the United States and the Carib- bean. From all accounts, it is clear that African slaves in Egypt did not suf- fer the brutality that so characterized the treatment of blacks in the Ameri- can South.There was no similar plantation culture in which nuclear families were torn apart or in which slaves were subjected to horrifying physical abuse.Although the experience of being captured and the treks of slave car- avans on the Forty Days' Road (darb al-arba`ïn) were notoriously difficult for recently enslaved Sudanese, once in Egypt their experiences did tend to be milder than those of American slaves.

The nature of the slavery lived by black men and women in Egypt in the nineteenth century is rarely if ever discussed without being compared to the searing experiences of African slaves in the United States and the Carib- bean. From all accounts, it is clear that African slaves in Egypt did not suf- fer the brutality that so characterized the treatment of blacks in the Ameri- can South.There was no similar plantation culture in which nuclear families were torn apart or in which slaves were subjected to horrifying physical abuse.Although the experience of being captured and the treks of slave car- avans on the Forty Days’ Road (darb al-arba`ïn) were notoriously difficult for recently enslaved Sudanese, once in Egypt their experiences did tend to be milder than those of American slaves.

There is no agreement on the exact number of black slaves in Egypt dur- ing the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the trade in slaves from the Sudan reached its peak. Gabriel Baer writes that it was impossible to establish the exact number of slaves in Egypt at any time in that century, but basing his estimation on contemporary British accounts, the census of 1850, and the records of the slave trade bureaus established after the Anglo- Egyptian Convention in 1877, he figured that throughout the century the number of slaves remained between twenty and thirty thousand. Judith Tucker never arrived at a total figure of slaves, although she posits that, between 1877 and 1905, twenty-five thousand slaves were manumitted in Egypt.

There is no agreement on the exact number of black slaves in Egypt dur- ing the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the trade in slaves from the Sudan reached its peak. Gabriel Baer writes that it was impossible to establish the exact number of slaves in Egypt at any time in that century, but basing his estimation on contemporary British accounts, the census of 1850, and the records of the slave trade bureaus established after the Anglo- Egyptian Convention in 1877, he figured that throughout the century the number of slaves remained between twenty and thirty thousand. Judith Tucker never arrived at a total figure of slaves, although she posits that, between 1877 and 1905, twenty-five thousand slaves were manumitted in Egypt. The majority of African slaves in Egypt were women who served as domestic workers in private homes, although in upper Egypt there were documented examples of agricultural slavery, and many slaves were recruited for military service early in the century.

Clearly, slavery was a terrible conundrum for Egyptian Muslims. Shafïk’s articles focused primarily on the experience of African slaves, as if the sanc- tity of marriage to Circassian slaves was too private an issue to be discussed. In doing this, he relegated African slaves to the same status as Circassian slaves, gentrifying their experience in Egypt while identifying the harshness of their severance from their own families in the Sudan with the institution of Western slavery.

And clearly, his belief in the legality of Islamic slavery was made even more complicated by the nationalist struggle against the British. The very fact that the British abolitionists were right, that the Qur´an did not forbid slavery and the shari`a made provision for it, touched a nerve that had existed deep in the core of Egyptian nationalism since its inception.

The dialogue begins when Sa´id meets Bakhïta and asks her where she is now working, and she answers that she has no work, and that she wishes they were still slaves, still being cared for and fed by their masters. Sa´id reminds her that they were also regularly beaten by these same masters, and Bakhïta concedes that she finds pleasure in freedom. But still she laments, “We came from our country like beasts [zay al-bahä´im], and it was our masters who taught us about Islam [al-kaläm wa al-hadïth] and taught us about cleanliness, food, drink, how to dress and how to speak properly, since we spoke in a way that no one could understand.”

Sa´id agrees that the employment situation of former slaves is dire, and he tells Bakhïta that he thinks the government should take responsibility for them and give every manumitted slave a plot of land from royal estates and the necessary machinery and tools. After all, he says, the government used them to cultivate a lot of land, year after year, and also conscripted many soldiers out of the Sudan. Sa´id says he has even heard that the Ottoman sultan offered such a gesture to the Sudanese, from whose agricultural effort the empire profited.

This was a daring and singular suggestion on al-Nadïm’s part, asking the Egyptian government to take responsibility for the futures of the men and women formerly enslaved by Egyptians. He also recognized, in this dia- logue, how difficult it was for freed slaves, especially women, to find places for themselves in society.

Al-Nadïm knew that many of his pieces were read out loud, and thus he forced his readers to articulate this challenge to themselves as well as to illit- erate listeners. The reader would therefore become both subject and object for a brief moment, before he and his listeners began to discuss the merits of al-Nadïm's points. Unlike the dialogues of Yaqüb Sanüa, in which Sudanese characters regularly mispronounce Egyptian dialect, al-Nadïm offers no indication of accent in this discussion. Would people reading this dialogue out loud have mimicked Sudanese or Nubian accents? Would that last sentence have felt like a rebuke of such mimicry, or would it have been an effective means of driving home the point about Sa´id's humanity?

Al-Nadïm thus held up proper marriage within Islam as an ideal and, with Bakhïta's incapacity to even imagine herself as an active part of this ideal, demonstrates one sad consequence of long years of servitude. In reveal- ing a woman stunted by her "education," he contradicts the traditional asser- tion that slavery had taught the Sudanese how to be civilized.

One point drawn from al-Nadïm's dialogue was that slavery was an inter- nal matter for Egyptians to settle. It presented a painful and troubling his- tory to Egyptians, the ramifications of which they had not even begun to cope with. But nowhere in al-Nadïm's poignant dialogue, or earlier articles on similar subjects, do the British appear. For al-Nadïm, slavery was part and parcel of Egypt's historic relation with the Sudan; the British did not, and should not, figure in the debate.

This crisis over internal slavery was further fueled by the unfolding events in the Sudan: by the mid-1890s, reports of escaped prisoners had made it clear to both the Egyptian and British public that the Mahdist state in the Sudan, then being run by the Mahdï's succes- sor, the khalifa Abdullah al-Taishï, was overwhelmed with famine and war. British officials waged a propaganda campaign to garner public support for the reconquest of the Sudan, brandishing the memory of General Charles Gordon like a sword. General Reginald Wingate, chief of intelligence in Egypt, spearheaded his own literary campaign for colonizing the Sudan, by translating and popularizing works by the Mahdï's escaped prisoners, con- temporaries of Ibrahïm Fawzï, such as Rudolph Slatin Pasha. His propa- ganda campaign horrified Egyptian nationalists, who wanted the Sudan returned to Egypt but not to an Egypt subdued and occupied by the British.

But the perceived chaos in the Sudan was not the same, many felt, as the situation in Egypt. In Egypt there was no war, and many nationalist thinkers believed the British to be conflating the two.Their focus on slavery asserted the primacy of Egyptian voices—it had to be left to Egyptians to decide. Others felt the British abolitionists, with little sense of or feeling for the dif- ferences between local custom in Egypt or the Sudan, were crossing into interiors where they had no business.

In 1894, Alï Pasha Sharïf repeat- edly called for the dismissal of Schaefer, the head of the Slave Trade Bureau, and the dissolution of all its branches around the country. He protested the inflated salaries of its officials and what he claimed was a lack of need for such internal policing, as slavery was no longer an issue in Egypt. So it was with great irony and fanfare that Alï Pasha Sharïf himself was arrested and, along with three other prominent members of the pasha class, charged with illegally buying six Sudanese slave women from a caravan that had crossed the Libyan desert in August of 1894.

The court case that ensued revealed, more than any other event up to this point, how intricately connected the issue of slavery was to the question of controlling the Sudan, in the views of contemporary Egyptian nationalists and British officials. In this case, a woman named Zanüba, in the company of five other young Sudanese women and three Egyptian traders, had walked barefoot across the desert in the August heat to be sold as a slave in the profitable underground slave market of Cairo.

In between sat Zanüba, who would testify against these pillars of the Egyptian community. Zanüba and the question of her guardianship served as a metaphor for the Sudan question of the time. Each side fought over these tired women in ragged clothing with the same ideologies and slogans with which they fought over the Sudan itself. All participants in the trial, from the British officials to the reporters and editors of the nationalist press, seemed aware that only the proper custodian of these women could fly his flag over the reconquered Sudan.

Zanüba answered very clearly the questions about her actual position in this whole affair. In his own defense, one of the traders had claimed Zanüba was not his slave but his wife. Zanüba countered, in her own testimony, “I am not his wife, and I am not his freed slave. I am a slave he brought here to be sold for money.”All the papers quoted verbatim this startling declaration of identity, this clear assertion by a slave of being a slave, but one accompa- nied by no claim of connection, or belonging, to any master. She had refused to go along with the subterfuge of his claim of marriage. She thus indicted the traders, but her assertion still kept her strangely unsituated.

These administrators were hotly pursued by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society for detailed information on slaves and slave raids. Through this network that disseminated information about the qual- ities of Egyptian government and culture, the idea spread that Muslim slaveholders used the cloak of Islamic tradition to veil the presence of the slave trade, and that this same subterfuge was employed to justify Egypt's presence in the Sudan. Egypt's attempts at empire were thus dismissed, and Britain's empire in Egypt and the Sudan justified.

These pictographic ideas circulated unabated in 1894, particularly during the pashas' trial, when Herbert Kitchener, the sirdär (commander) of Egypt, suggested that `Alï Pasha Sharïf's harem be searched for three other slaves, “white women being identified by their hands and allowed to pass without being examined.” In the eyes of these British officials, the black hands and black skin of any woman living in an Egyptian household automatically sig- nified a slave: thus black women in Egyptian homes could only have been brought there illegally, in a state of criminally imposed bondage.

The pashas' defense lawyers insisted that there was a gaping inconsistency in the 1877 treaty itself. While the treaty clearly delineated the punishment for the slave trader and his accomplices, it said nothing at all about the buyer.

Buying slaves was thus a benevolent mission of rescue, and buyers were civilizing agents for the wretched of the Sudan. The English editor of the Egyptian Gazette, a paper heavily subsidized by Lord Cromer, predictably rejected the claims of inherent mercy in the purchase of slaves and amplified the relationship of this argument to the larger issue on trial: which culture, British or Egyptian, was better equipped to control the Sudan itself? For the Gazette editor, Egyptian society was irrevocably tainted by Islamic despotism both publicly and privately, a factor that made Egyptians as incapable of gov- erning others as they were of managing their own political independence: “Surely it would not be safe to entrust persons with so slight a sense of moral and political responsibility with more power than they now have. They are clearly not yet educated up to the positions which they hold.

The slave trial ended with the conviction of the one pasha who had actu- ally confessed to buying one of the slaves. The Bedouin traders were also found guilty and sentenced to five years' hard labor.The court acquitted the other pashas of all charges, a verdict that the majority of Egyptian newspa- pers heralded as a national victory.

At the time of the pashas' trial in Cairo, Mustafa Kämil led the nationalism movement; he was the founder of the Hizb al-watanï, or the Nationalist Party, whose ideas about the Egyptian nation (and the Islamic nation, a con- cept that incorporated loyalty to both religion and the Ottoman Empire) would be extremely influential for decades to come.

In a speech he gave in Toulouse, in July of 1895, Kämil presented an almost medical depiction of the violence committed against the Egyptian government by the British occupation gov- ernment in 1884, when, during the Mahdïya, the British forced the Egyptians to evacuate the Sudan,"the Sudan which we consider the spirit of our dear land, on which hangs the life of our country, and its death."

In the few Sudanese territories still held by Egypt after 1885, army command was monopolized by British officers, which cost Egyptian soldiers their sense of patriotism, forcing them to fight like automatons for the very people against whom they should have been rebelling. As Kämil put it, in Paris in late 1895,"The spirit which pervades every army in the world, the spirit of love for the motherland [al-watan], does not exist in our army.

In the Sudan during the Turkïya, slaves were often con- scripted as soldiers in the army regiments known as the jihädïya. By the 1890s they actually outnumbered the contracted Egyptian soldiers by a ratio of two to one. These slave soldiers were absolutely essential to the main- tenance of the military camps, work that presumably included the tasks Kämil so dreaded for Egyptian soldiers. His indignation also echoed with resentment over Egyptians' loss of authority over the Sudanese themselves, and the consequent shame at occupying the low status once belonging to the Sudanese.

The Sudan would never have been interjoined with this land [lam tultahim bi hädhä al-qatr] were it not for the blood of its men [Egyp- tians], would never have been subdued under the Ottoman flag if not for the resolution of its heroes, and the flow of its money. She is the maiden territory [al-aqtar ash-shäbah] in which the blood of martyrs has spilled, not so she would become easy prey [ghanïma barda] for the British, but rather to be the treasure [mudakhiran] of Egyptians, a wide sanctuary for the comfort of the two peoples, the source of all riches and the stop for all trade.

Almost like a eunuch, Egypt was to suffer in its most sensitive part. He mourns this in vivid language in an article in the French newspaper Le Clair, after the retaking of Atbara in the Sudan:

The Sudan, as is clear to the reader, is a piece of Egypt and has been stripped from her with no legal right, because the Egyptian khedivial government has not the least right to give up even a foot of her land or allow someone else to possess it. With this to be considered, the Sudan is still Egyptian property, and the British do not have the right to any claims to it. It returned to khedivial authority after almost twenty years of the dervishes' upheaval, and even if British soldiers participated with us in the reconquest, we did not need their help. Our army, even less than our whole army, would have been enough to accomplish this result.

But Admiral Baring’s question still rang: if the Sudan was really Egypt’s possession, how did the Egyptians lose it? Kämil placed responsibility for this first on the British when he spoke in Alexandria in 1896: “Why did the Sudanese keep on determinedly rebelling against Egypt? Why would they not accept any agreement with us? No one can deny that the British pres- ence in Egypt made the Sudanese behave that way.” But another quality in the Sudanese propelled them into the Mahdïya against the Egyptians (and Kämil never denies that the Mahdists rebelled against an Egyptian, and not Ottoman, authority)—a native fanaticism

In reality, the Muslims of the Sudan are very rigid and fanatical; they would never and will never accept that any but Muslims rule them. In order to win them over, it is not necessary to use force; rather, we will call to them in the name of Islam. We will send to them in the name of the khedive and the sultan a religious embassy consisting of several `ulamä´. It would be enough, in stanching the fire of the revolution between them and bringing them to our side, for us to enter their terri- tory carrying the Holy Qur´an in one hand and the flag of the Prophet in the other.

Here, Kämil echoes claims about native Sudanese excess (either religious or sexual) that Muhammad al-Tunisï and Shaykh Rifaah Rafi al-Tahtawï had discussed two generations before. As a culture, Kämil continues, Egypt was uniquely imbued with the capacity to bridge this untamed religious energy and western European society. He asks, “Is there any other country in the world as suited by religious liberalism [al-muhidd] and absolute moderation to be the medium between civilized Europe and fanatical Africa if not Egypt?”

But two years after this speech, through what was, for Kämil, its shame- ful and shaming seizure of Omdurman in 1898, Great Britain opened the Pandora’s box that was Africa. In doing so, British military officials had revealed a degree of their own savagery and fanaticism when they revenged Gordon’s death by ripping apart the tomb of the Mahdï. Kämil mourned the desecration, but even more, he resented that it had been committed in the name of General Gordon. With this act of disrespect, the British had stamped their name onto the Sudan

In Kämil’s representation, the British wiped away the names and mem- ory of the Egyptian dead in the Sudan as they engraved their own mark on the region with the letters of Gordon’s name. With the collusion of the Egyptian public, this action succeeded in rendering anonymous Egypt’s role in the reclamation of the Sudan or, as Kämil suggests, in rendering Egypt flagless there. British officials used their power to distort the name and rep- utation of the Egyptian people by asserting that it was Egyptians, especially nationalists, who were fanatical and beyond the pale of self-control. This projected an image of Egyptian savagery

Kämil’s equation of fanaticism with barbarism also bore racial ramifica- tions.These were made more explicit in a book inspired by Kämil’s work that was published anonymously in 1898 by “one of Egypt’s men of letters.”The author actually blamed the British for sowing seeds of racial discord between the black Sudanese and the white Egyptians, yet he was careful to name those tribes who had good Muslim customs and those with whom no contact was possible due to their uncivilized, un-Islamic behavior. His descriptions of Egyptian colonial life in Khartoum and Berber portray Egyptians as aloof from Sudanese culture, living in an exclusive enclave and behaving very much like British colonialists

Keeping contact minimal between Egyptians and Sudanese in his ac- counts of the Sudan, the author also set up a racial scale by which he mea- sured Sudanese tribes, which depended on how savage their customs were. People of Sennär, for example, practiced a frightening magic, in which they could turn themselves into wolves.Though such devilish practices were not appropriate for discussion, the author wrote coyly, presenting them in his book made certain his readers knew that people from Sennär were not at all like Egyptians. The blackest of all tribes, the Dinka and the Shilluk, lived way beyond the pale, worshiping pagan idols and wearing hardly any clothes. And yet, page after page, the author asserted that indissoluble links existed between Egypt and the Sudan based on Islam.

Kämil originated this particular dualism in the definitions of fanatical [mut`asib] and barbarian [mutawahish] and asserted it as a basis for Egyptian domination. As he described them, the Sudanese were fanatic and savage, particularly in terms of religion. Only Egyptian Muslims knew how to translate this wild energy into a viable society. “We know them,” Kämil seemed to be saying of the Sudanese, “but we are not them.” His represen- tation of the Sudanese, however, distorted their image with the same force that British invectives against savagery visited on the image of Egyptians. The identification with both colonizer and colonized within the Egyptian nationalist movement presents itself vividly here.The speeches and writings of Kämil and his imitators shows an effort to twist through the narrow parameters by which civilization was gauged in the 1890s. But by using the measurements and instruments of the master, Kämil in important ways offered his submission to British hegemony.

In the years that followed the condominium’s establishment, a literature emerged in Egypt in which every aspect of British society and culture was dissected and explored for clues to the success of Great Britain’s empire. Some of these works were filled with admiration for a culture like England’s that could rule almost the entire world.Ahmad Fathï Zaghlül, brother of the Wafd Party leader and future prime minister Sa`d Zaghlül, published Sirr al- taqaddum al-Anglo-Saxïyïn?, a translation of the book À quoi tient la supériorité des anglo-saxons? (What Is the Secret of Anglo-Saxon Superi- ority?), written in 1898 by Edmond Demolins. This book explored the suc- cesses of the British empire, looking for formulas for other societies to emu- late, and became popular throughout Europe.

All the great civilizations were imperial, Salah Hamad wrote, although many, like Spain in America or Britain in Australia, had butchered and com- mitted genocide; but England and the rest of Europe had developed a more sympathetic and humane colonization, exemplified in the abolitionists’ care for African blacks. Egyptians could also trace historical precedents for impe- rialism in their own history, and Hamad turned to the links with the Sudan

The Sudan is Egypt’s by right of conquest. She is a part of Egypt, and her not being separated is vital to Egypt’s life, due to her holding the source of the Nile and being her neighbor. We loathed giving her up, then she was reconquered, this time with the participation of the Eng- lish. During all of that we were submissive to the contract of the Condo- minium and the triumphant power [England]. That administration is void before public opinion and the law. The arrangement of the Condo- minium alters nothing of the correct concept that all Egyptians hold dear, and that is that colonizing [isti`mär] the Sudan is the right of Egyptians, and no one else, just as the subsidizing of the Sudan is the duty of Egyptians, and no one else. Egyptians look at the Sudanese as brothers, as a part of their community, so it’s their responsibility to look out for their brothers’ welfare.

Lutfï al-Sayyid’s newspaper, al-Jarïda, regularly set aside front-page space for the issue of colonizing the Sudan. So tight were the bonds between the two countries that even the name Sudan made no sense, wrote `Abd al- Qadir Hamza, a frequent contributor. In language that removes a separate identity from the Sudanese, he states, “I do not know why the Sudan is named anything other than Egypt, and it amazes me that we accepted this appellation during eras of oppression.” The Sudan was not a separate nation, no matter what its name, but the name had the deleterious effect of making people think it was separate.

We are the first among all peoples to colonize the Sudan, which as I said is an organ of Egypt’s. She is closer to us than any other country, her history linked to our history, her people the closest to ever have mixed with us. In fact, you can hardly tell the difference between us, our Nile is the Sudan’s Nile, and our blood has flowed there in ancient and in modern times, our money spent there in the tens of millions.

The Sudan as Egypt’s soul was a standard formula in the nationalist lexicon, until Lutfï al-Sayyid deepened the discussion with his ideas about shared culture creating family ties. The Egyptians had experi- enced everything the Sudanese had experienced, and this past bound their

It is a mistake to consider the Sudan an Egyptian colony. The Sudan is rather a part of what makes up Egypt; she completes Egypt. There is Lower Egypt, and the Sudan is Upper Egypt.

It is a mistake to consider the Sudan an Egyptian colony. The Sudan is rather a part of what makes up Egypt; she completes Egypt. There is Lower Egypt, and the Sudan is Upper Egypt. Every Sudanese bears the same responsibilities to the nation of Egypt as every native Egyptian. When Sudanese people mention the tyranny of some Egyptian rulers, Egyptians can also relate the despotism of their own rulers. Egypt at times suffered autocrats the entire length of the nation. If it was within a governor's power in the Sudan to hang a Sudanese, it was also within the power of the mudïr of Daqhiliyya or Sharqiyya [Egyptian provinces] to hang an Egyptian.

Every Sudanese bears the same responsibilities to the nation of Egypt as every native Egyptian. When Sudanese people mention the tyranny of some Egyptian rulers, Egyptians can also relate the despotism of their own rulers. Egypt at times suffered autocrats the entire length of the nation. If it was within a governor's power in the Sudan to hang a Sudanese, it was also within the power of the mudïr of Daqhiliyya or Sharqiyya [Egyptian provinces] to hang an Egyptian.

As `Umad Ahmad Hiläl has written, slaves in all their forms in Egypt had no knowledge of classical Arabic. Even after Circassian-Ottoman slaves were manumitted, the majority remained affili- ated with the Turkish-speaking social classes and were fairly isolated from Arabic-speaking groups. Sudanese slaves, the majority of whom came from the non-Muslim territories of the Sudan, communicated with each other in the colloquial dialect.

Despite such passion, this woman rejected him. A little later, he wrote a qasïda called "Al-zanjiya al-husna" (The Beautiful Negro), in which he turned the alienation people felt about the color of his skin into a celebration of Sudanese women. Instead of using the word `abd here to mean slaves, he uses common names for black slaves to situate this love

It had seemed to many nationalists that the British government's declaration of the protectorate over Egypt had been a wartime necessity, but once the war ended and there was no indication given of lifting the protectorate. Zaghlül and his associates hoped that, as representatives of Egypt, they could travel to Paris for the postwar peace conference to present their country's case for independence from the British empire. Zaghlül and the other members of the delegation, or Wafd as their party came to be known, asked in late 1918 for permission from the British Resident, Sir Reginald Wingate, to leave for Europe for the conference. Wingate refused to allow them even passports.

Egyptians' nationalistic feeling suffered during World War I, when London declared Egypt a protectorate of the British empire. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian nationalists lost the nominal alternative of allegiance to the sultan; although it took longer to abolish the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had united them with other Muslims around the world was terribly weakened and a bulwark against European imperialism was lost.

News of their arrest provoked demonstrations first in Cairo, Alexandria, and other major cities, then in the countryside. The demonstrators ranged from lawyers and pashas to students and peasants. In a new kind of political gesture, upper-class women joined the demonstrations, and their participa- tion was welcomed.

With less of a grasp on the instruments of power, Egyptian officials in the Sudan had a more difficult time trying to shape Sudanese political identities. In addition to nationalist volunteers previously mentioned in British intel- ligence reports, several local committees, made up of Egyptian army officers and bureaucrats, tried by means of a pamphlet campaign to inspire the Sudanese to support Sa`d Zaghlül and join them in destabilizing the British- led government. This met with some success, but pamphlets took time to spread through the population, and then reached only a small fraction of Sudanese. There were also Egyptian efforts to participate in the burgeon- ing press of the northern Sudan, such as the weekly Rä´id al-südän, which began publication in 1913. This Arabic journal sponsored poetry competi- tions and asked readers to elaborate on works by well-known Egyptian nationalist poets like Hafiz Ibrahïm,Ahmad Shawqï, and Mahmüd Samï al- Barüdï. As Heather Sharkey points out, this journal offered a platform on which northern Sudanese contributors could argue that "pagan, supersti- tious, or otherwise 'un-Islamic' customs were thwarting hopes for new Arab glory in Sudan." Thus, cultural links with Egypt apparently were prized as a way of reinforcing those elements of Sudanese culture that were not "African."

It is important to remember that many groups in the Sudan detested the condominium and had risen against the British even before 1919.The British had repeatedly sent troops to combat the defiant Dinka in the southern Sudan almost from the time the condominium was established, in 1899, until 1917, when they were finally able to suppress the rebellions. Revolts in the Nuba Mountains had begun as early as 1903, and the Nyam Nyam contin- ued to fight the British until 1916. But these struggles garnered little atten- tion in Egypt, where they were not considered representative of any kind of "nationalist" movement. In the perspective of the time, these were tribal actions, eruptions of black tribes considered beyond the pale of organized political movements.

The Egyptian nationalist press did not like the message of Hadärat al- südän and responded angrily to the London trip made by the famous Sudanese sayyids, but their protest was irrelevant: the members of this del- egation were old enemies and were not expected to be reliable participants in an Egyptian-Sudanese nationalist movement.

The Wafd leaders looked for loyalty from other segments of the Sudanese population. But the Egyptian nationalist movement's influence in the Sudan was limited by the narrow scope of Egyptian political power within the Sudanese government. Egyptian nationalists were also thwarted by a difficulty in conceptualizing new groups within the Sudan, like the British-termed "negroid but detrib- alized" former slaves and children of slaves from the southern Sudan who had converted to Islam and were being educated in the north of the country, but who had little if any contact with the cultural past of their childhoods. This was an ignorance they shared with the British and with the neo- Mahdists of the northern Sudan, who had few coherent policies for how to deal politically with these former slaves.

Many sections of her memoirs discuss this issue and her desire to play a leading role in the struggle to achieve the unity of the Nile Valley. But why did she propagate this issue so strongly, to the point where, as she her- self wrote, the issue of the Sudan began to appear synonymous with the issue of women's rights in Egypt? How did she translate the personal into the political?

This insistence on shrouding the truth was intended to keep women and children in their place in a hierarchy of authority within the household. But another hierarchy also had to be invoked—that which separated slaves from the rest of the family. Sharawï respected one tradition begun by her grand- father and continued by her father, which was to make sure that one was loved by one's slaves and servants. But this love was more complicated for the children of the household, whom the slaves had to discipline in the name of the children's father and the slaves' master.The embodiment of this was the obedient yet authoritative black eunuch of Sultan Pasha's house- hold, Lala Saïd Agha, guardian of the children, the last word among the other servants, and the overseer of the children's education.

Sharawï and her brother thus knew that these slaves were not indigenous to Egypt, but they had been there so long, and had been in the household so long, that the pain of their separation from their own families and the mem- ories of their own childhoods were candlelight stories, told and remembered like lullaby folktales. It is hard to tell from the memoirs how Sharawï incor- porated this knowledge of the slaves' pasts, but it may explain why the only person who could give her comfort when she was engaged to her much older cousin was Sa`ïd Agha, who whispered into her ear not to cry, not to dis- honor her father's memory or make her mother sick. Who else, she implies, could understand as well the meaning of passage into captivity?

Sha`rawï was eighteen years old when the fury over Qäsim Amïn's Tahrïr al-Mar´a (The Liberation of Women) blew through Egypt in 1899. In her memoirs she defended the book, seeing it as a door through which she and other women were able to pass into public life later, but she was sur- prised, at the time of its publication, that many of her contemporaries, all women of her class, disliked the book intensely: "How many times did we hear then women denying the issues and principles about which Qäsim Amïn wrote, despite the fact that these principles were for their betterment, because to recognize that would have meant recognizing their own power- lessness and this would have injured their arrogance. They reminded me of slave women who, when presented with their manumission papers, would cry for their past lives of obedience and imprisonment."

As an adult, Sharawï shared with other nationalists the duality about colonialism in the Sudan and the imperialism of Great Britain. An intimate of the Wafdist leaders and one of the most prominent women to join the nationalist cause during the 1919 revolution, Sharawï repeated all the Wafd's ideas about the Sudan, saying, "We must hold on to our rights with respect to the issue of the Sudan, considering the Sudan an inseparable part of Egypt, and not a colony." But by 1921, Sharawï had become one of the most vociferous activists in the Sudan issue, and she used her role as the leader of the Central Wafd Committee for Women to publicize her views and criticize Sad Zaghlül for what she considered his increasing laxity in pressuring the British on this point.

Deprived of the opportunities that British officials in the Sudan had to study Sudanese culture and society, Egyptian nationalists still employed their own inventiveness in trying to shape the Sudan. Unable to describe (or invent, as some have suggested) Sudanese tribal culture as H. A. MacMichael could, they invented other roles for the Sudanese to play, as characters in their propaganda. In the growing sphere of Egyptian popular culture, artists with strong nationalist perspectives continued to create the "true" voice of the Sudan, hear what they wanted to hear, and exercise a kind of ventriloquism, putting words in the mouths of Sudanese characters when they could not find real Sudanese to fit the role. In the absence of the "right" kind of Sudanese political allies—that is, those who would proclaim a desire for the unity of the Nile Valley—the Egyptian artists and writers deeply involved in the promulga- tion of the nationalist message made up their own Sudanese. These icons were never presented within the context of their own culture, which seemed to have remained somewhat of a mystery to most Egyptians of this period, but were instead almost uniformly portrayed as friendly servants and bawäbïn (doormen), grateful and proud to be installed in Egyptian house- holds or to be in Egypt itself.

In a creative gesture of ventriloquism, this Sudanese character speaks the lan- guage of the Wafd Party. He welcomes this homey atmosphere and makes clear his sentiment that there is no difference, politically or geographically, between the Sudan and Egypt.There is no difference, however, because there is no real Sudan in this song—it is a place the Sudanese emigrate from quickly in order to stay and work in Egypt; as such, it is simply part of the Egyptian backyard.

Al-Kassär perfected a character known as Osman Abd al-Basit, a servant whose affability and humor won al-Kassär the honorific Barbarï Masr al-Wahïd (the one and only Nubian of Egypt). Al-Kassär performed in blackface at the Majestic Theater on Imad al-Dïn Street in downtown Cairo, in the heart of the the- ater district that grew so lively in World War I (see fig. 8).

The British in fact recognized the potential for political agitation that popular theaters of the Ezbekiya section of Cairo presented (the same neigh- borhood in which al-Kassär performed); shortly after demonstrations led by stage actors in 1919, the administration closed all theaters until the uprising ended.

This point both adds and subtracts from the message of the play and oth- ers like it. Osman must constantly stand up for his own dignity against the continued racial differentiations that other Egyptian characters lob at him, just as Sad Zaghlül resisted the authority of the British. But neither Osman nor the politicians of 1919 questioned the actual social hierarchies that the British had used to their advantage to solidify control. In fact, in none of the plays I examined did Osman abd al-Basit ever question the higher social rank of Egyptians or insist on his right to greater upward social mobility.

Like the other vehicles for al-Kassär, this play also derives great humor from mistaken identities. Oshaka thinks she is a foreigner, and so spies patriotically for her country, aided by the malevolent Shinshaw, who is keen on revenging the death of his soldier nephews killed in battle by Osman. Meanwhile, Oshaka is in love with Petrov, the patriotic officer of the other side. As the fast-paced events unfold, Oshaka and Shinshaw succeed in implicating Osman when important military records are stolen from under Petrov. As it happens, Oshaka is the long-lost daughter of the female doctor who tends the soldiers of Petrov's army, and who, long before, had tattooed her daughter's arm with her initials, her daughter's initials, and her hus- band's initials.

The play thus revolves on the genetics of nationalism. Nationalism is a blood matter, as shown by Oshaka when she realizes that she is the daugh- ter of parents from a country she had long considered to be enemy territory.

Part of the issue stemmed from Alï al-Kassär's performing as a black character from the lower if not lowest rungs of Egyptian society and the question of whether such a character could possibly educate audiences about the goals of Egyptian nationalism. Recent criticism has defended al-Kassär's choice of character as a figure representative of many Nubians who had come to Egypt to seek their fortunes, and who tried to maintain their dig- nity in the face of British imperialism as well. In this sense, Osman abd al- Basit was an interesting emblem of the Nile Valley's unity, and proof that Nubians and Sudanese alike had the same nationalistic feelings and were staunch supporters of the call for cohesion made by the Egyptians in 1919. From this the argument could be drawn that Osman taught his audiences an important geographic lesson, in which the Sudan and Nubia must always be considered part and parcel of the Egyptian nation.

Al-Kassär continued to play Osman well into the 1930s and was, in that decade, also heard regularly on the radio, which underscores how easily blackface makeup translated into jokes about accents and foreign behavior that could be appreciated even on the airwaves. But the fact of an Egyptian acting out the words of a Nubian who was in turn imitating Egyptians and foreigners adds yet another level of self-conscious irony to this portrayal: the character of the Nubian becomes a mouthpiece through which a native son could reflect on his own country. Through this manipulated and sani- tized figure of the Sudan, the closeness and unity of the Nile Valley could be left unchallenged while the attention of the audience was turned toward their own society, and themselves.

Taymür felt strongly a need for “Egyptianizing” the literature of his country and creating a school of writing that was uniquely Egyptian. In this quest for realism,Taymür developed a dialogue with his readers in which he encouraged them to nod knowingly with him about the social “types” he presented in his stories while, at the same time, he challenged them to see themselves in much of the pettiness and snobbery his narrator recounted.

But as his harsh criti- cism of more populist artists reveals, Taymür's sense of political unity con- flicted with his deeper sense of, and belief in, hierarchies of class. Beneath the challenging questions Taymür put to his audience about changing social morals, particularly about drug use and adultery, Taymür's true question asked which class of Egyptians would lead Egypt into modernity.

The characters presented in the collection of short stories Ma tarähu al- `uyün (What the Eyes Saw) are not timeless archetypes of Egyptian society but are presented as being well aware of their own temporal elasticity.With social and cultural circumstances changing so quickly in Egypt as a result of the end of both the Ottoman Empire and World War I, and the growth of the nationalist movement, these characters struggle with a sense of their own mortality.The circumstances that created them were being effaced, cre- ating new social habits and, in effect, new Egyptians.

In a work collectively called Muhakima mu´alifï al-riwaya al-tamthïlïya (translated by M. M. Badawi as Dialogue of the Dead), Taymür expressed the cultural ambivalence of Egyptian writers, adding another element to the debate about cultural self- representation. These pieces take place as a dream of the narrator, in which artists both dead and alive gather in the hall of Dar al-Opera al-Sultaniyya. The occasion is a trial in which the artistic ability of contemporary and well- known playwrights is to be judged by classical, canonical writers, all mem- bers of Muhammad Taymür's personal pantheon: Shakespeare, Molière, Corneille, Racine, Edmond Roustand, and Goethe.

The most interesting accusation is leveled against Khalil Bey Matran, at that time one of Egypt's most famous poets, for not adapting more of Shakespeare's plays into Arabic. Matran defends himself by saying the three plays he did adapt were per- formed so poorly by George Abyad, or were implanted with Egyptian music and dances when performed by Shaykh al-Hijazï and were in such poor taste, that he resolved never again to subject Shakespeare to Egyptian directors. The judges acquit Matran and thank him for his sensitivity to Hamlet.

It also offers insights into the powerful self- consciousness experienced by Egyptian writers when comparing themselves to European culture, a self-consciousness paralleled by the needs of nation- alist politicians to prove their country's integrity overseas. The judges of Taymür's articles seemed concerned with the improper importation of for- eign dramatic customs (like American-style advertising) and poor transla- tions, issues about which Taymür had previously voiced his concern.Yet the issue of realism that so strongly concerned Taymür in other writings is put aside here. As foreigners the judges are in no position to question the real- ism of the accused's work, but have full authority over artistic standards. What is most important in these articles, then, is the question of where Egypt stands as a culture with respect to Europe.When compared with such august luminaries as Molière and Corneille, Taymür seems to say, we Egyptians are only comical imitators.

As interesting as his self-conscious discussion of art in Egypt was, when it came to the Sudanese Taymür himself remained caught in representa- tional clichés that defied his own pleas for realism. If Egyptians, at that point in their cultural history, were amusing imitators of Europe, then the Sudan- ese remained, for Taymür, humorous diversions for Egyptians. Sudanese characters almost always appear as servants in Taymür's written work. In the first play he wrote in colloquial Arabic, Al-`usfür fi al-qafas (The Sparrow in the Cage), the Sudanese eunuch Fayrüz Agha injects an element of comedy in this otherwise tragic story of a wealthy Egyptian family.

Realism ends at the border between Fayrüz Agha and the other characters of the play, all of whom show depth and development. But Fayrüz Agha comes straight from older, stereotypical traditions of Sudanese characters, so much so that he evokes, for M. M. Badawi, the Sudanese servants of Yaqüb Sanüa's sketches, written in the 1870s.

Intended to be both amusing and a true reflection of daily life, Al-usfür portrays a family of characters whose lives are completely shaped by the miserliness of the father, Muhammad Pasha Alï Ziftawi. Eager to be re- elected to the new Majlis al-Nuwäb (the recently created Egyptian House of Representatives), Muhammad Pasha spends thousands of pounds to impress his peers but little to feed or clothe his family.

Social position is, in fact, the kernel of the play, as the characters wrestle with what kind of relations are appropriate and inappropriate in Egyptian society. In this sense, the idea of the Sudanese as servants fits a long tradi- tion in the representation of social borders. The Sudanese servant is part of an old and idealized image of the proper Ottoman–ruling class household and of the social boundaries upheld and enforced by Egypt's elites.

Where Fayrüz Agha's character functions as an icon of servitude in a traditional family, Khalïfa's character actually articulates and explains the tradition. Khalïfa is the true son of Egypt, connected to his peo- ple in a way undreamed of by the wretched servant Fayrüz Agha.

It is ironic that Alï al-Kassär, considered by many to be the most simplistic and ribald figure in the Egyptian theater, cre- ated the most complicated Nubian figure, one who was at least allowed to stand up for himself against many of the racial attitudes common among Egyptians in this period. But his Osman abd al-Basit did not break the mold completely. However, while `Alï al-Kassär was gaining notoriety portraying this honest, brave, and buffoonish character, people in the Sudan were grow- ing more politicized themselves, and much of the impetus for the burgeon- ing Sudanese nationalist movement came from those blacks in the Sudan long considered, and called, slaves. Shortly, their voices would emerge on the political scene and show the Egyptians and British a completely different aspect of their own changing society and culture.

In this period of Egyptians' efforts to explore their culture within the new context of political independence, journalism and theater served as mir- rors in which Egyptians could look at themselves both critically and hope- fully. Taymür and his contemporaries tried to perfect an image of the peo- ple of their country that other Egyptians could recognize and relate to, while at the same time they questioned the direction in which Egyptian society was headed. But these investigators of new roles for Egyptians drew a sharp boundary when they reached the Nubians and Sudanese in Egypt, who remained stereotyped in much the same manner as they had been in the plays and articles of dramatists and journalists writing fifty years earlier. Most of these black characters remained gullible, manipulable, ugly, asexual, undisciplined, and above all, humorous. They were lovable characters but blank, at a time when Egyptian writers characterized their own culture with greater complexity and insights.

To counter these pressures, Wingate retreated from the strong, anti-Mahdist stance he had maintained for decades and sought a rapprochement with the Mahdï's leading supporters, the Ansar, and the Sufi religious orders that continued to attract young Sudanese. He focused his attention on the Mahdï's posthumous son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahmän al-Mahdï, and on his rival, Sir Alï al-Mirghänï.

Wingate retreated from the strong, anti-Mahdist stance he had maintained for decades and sought a rapprochement with the Mahdï's leading supporters, the Ansar, and the Sufi religious orders that continued to attract young Sudanese. … Wingate and the officials of the Sudan government thus exploited the deep anti-Egyptian feeling among many of the Sudanese when they turned their support to the Mahdï's highly politicized son after they had fought for the Mahdïya.

For these groups, the British were indeed colonizers and non-Muslims, but their homeland was far away; one day they inevitably would leave. Egyptians had proven themselves harder to evict. So the Mahdists accepted the status quo under the British temporarily, as a "tactical alliance."

These groups blamed the Egyptians for bringing the British into the Sudan and destroying the Mahdïya, and felt strongly that Egyptian nation- alists sought only to reestablish Egyptian authority over the Sudan. For these groups, the British were indeed colonizers and non-Muslims, but their homeland was far away; one day they inevitably would leave. Egyptians had proven themselves harder to evict. So the Mahdists accepted the status quo under the British temporarily, as a “tactical alliance.”

Bedri was angry with the Egyptians for their continued protest against British-run irrigation projects for the Sudan and felt this protest showed the superficiality of their sense of unity. In indignation, he raised this point to the Egyptian politician: "But what your Ministers actually said was 'Irrigation in the Sudan will adversely affect the irrigation of Egypt at the present time.' Now does that really square with the picture which the Egyptian likes to paint of himself as the older brother caring for his younger, orphaned brother?"

The instruments of nationalism that Benedict Anderson stresses as cultural unifiers during colonialism— newspapers, plays, and cartoons—trickled into the Sudan from Egypt and found an appreciative audience among the new intelligentsia there. Para- doxically, these students, cadets, and clerks refused to accept the idea of the "Sudan for the Sudanese," considering it a slogan engineered by the British. For them, nationalism meant an alliance with Egypt.

As these currents of thought reveal, after 1919 the Sudanese had a stronger idea of whose hegemony they preferred than they had of what their own national identity was or who best represented it. But events quickly spiraled, leading to more concrete manifestations of Sudanese nationalism. Inspired by the 1919 demonstrations in Egypt and angered by the enforced separation between Egypt and the Sudan as delineated in the Milner report, a small group of clerks and minor government officials formed the League of Sudanese Union, one of whose members was a Muslim Dinka military cadet named Alï abd al-Latïf.

The issue for many Sudanese was the British refusal to allow them a political voice. In 1924, Alï abd al-Latïf formed a political party with other Sudanese officers and lower-level civil servants called the White Flag League, named after the emblem they chose for their representation, a white flag with the map of the Nile Valley emblazoned on it. Their stated goals were to unite the Sudan with Egypt and to force the British to leave the Sudan eventually, although they claimed not to be hostile to the “present government which legitimately exists in the Sudan in accordance with the Anglo-Egyptian Conventions of 1899.”

In addition to the effects of their “detribalization,” these former south- erners had to struggle with the ambitions and cultural expectations of other Sudanese tribes and classes. The traditional leaders so respected by the British administration—the “three Sayyids”: Alï al-Mirghänï, al-Sharif Yusuf al-Hindï, and the Mahdï’s son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdï— represented the two northern Arab tribes, the Barabra and the Dongolowi, tribes who for generations had bought and sold the ancestors of the soldiers and southerners that rallied around Alï abd al-Latïf. Al-Mahdï and the Ansar problematized the very term Sudanese, which in 1924 connoted “detribalized,” signifying a person of slave origins, a group that included Alï abd al-Latïf. Such individuals could lay no claim to a tribal name and, therefore, according to general opinion, spoke for no one.

Al-Latïf needed an organization that would accept his presence and assume his issues about race as well. His first political exercise was to join the League of Sudanese Union, formed in the early 1920s to counter the conservatism of the Mahdist and Sufi notables and in protest against the government’s policies of taxation and its sugar and cotton monopolies, which were raising the prices of staples and forcing Sudanese economic development to focus on massive agricultural enterprises like the Gezira irrigation plan.

In June, British soldiers detained a Sudanese activist, Muhammad al-Mahdï, for trying to reach Cairo and visit Parliament. His forced return on a train to Khartoum prompted anti-British demonstrations. These were soon followed by a funeral for a high-ranking and popular Egyptian official, in which speeches about the unity of the Nile Valley provoked yet another demonstration.

In November, Stack was murdered in Cairo. In angry response, Lord Allenby, then British consul in Egypt, quickly ordered the evacuation of all Egyptian troops from the Sudan. Zaghlül refused to issue the order, and Egyptian troops stationed in the Sudan refused to evacuate. In a gesture of loyalty to Egypt, Sudanese troops in the Eleventh Battalion rebelled and tried to reach their Egyptian colleagues to the north of Khartoum. Under heavy British fire, the Sudanese troops were finally defeated after retreating to a military hospital. The troops were dis- appointed that no similar gesture of loyalty had come from the Egyptian soldiers, who did not fire against the British. Then, the evacuation of Egyptian soldiers was accomplished quickly and completely, and by the end of November, the revolution in the Sudan had died down.

As a symbol, the Sudan continued to be batted around between Egypt and England; the Sudanese themselves continued to compare the imperial techniques of the Egyptians and the British.

Historians of the modern Sudanese note that the revolution left several legacies, among them the dramatic cessation of Egyptian influence over the Sudan and a bitterness among the Sudanese, who resented Cairo’s remain- ing inactive while scores of Sudanese were shot at or imprisoned during the demonstrations. The Egyptian lack of response to events in the Sudan, so abhorrent to Huda Sha`rawï, also provoked deep disillusionment among both Sudanese soldiers and participants in the White Flag League. This dis- appointment was as effective as British efforts in the smashing of the league.

The intensity of the pro-Egyptian feeling during the Sudanese revolu- tion surprised and pleased many Egyptian politicians and nationalists, and the violence of the demonstrations inspired huge headlines in the Egyptian press.Yet the spectacle of Sudanese activists did not create in Egypt a greater awareness of Sudanese interests or issues. Newspaper writers emphasized instead the impact of the rebellion on Egypt and the Egyptians present in Khartoum and Omdurman.

Bakhïta's martyrdom was her experience as a slave and, as the pamphlets about her printed by the Canossian Daughters of Charity emphasize, the loss of her childhood and her identity caused by her enslavement. … There is a transforming power in this identification with Bakhïta's alienation and suf- fering, a statement about the honor that can come from having been a slave.

The term Ottoman Egyptians, first coined by Toledano in State and Society in Mid–Nineteenth Century Egypt, has come to replace the term Turco- Circassians, used by Hourani and many others to describe the ruling classes of Egypt in the mid– to late nineteenth century. Ottoman Egyptian attributes a greater sense of Egyptian roots to this elite group, many of whom had Circas- sian ancestry but were comfortable in both Turkish and Arabic and considered themselves native to Egypt. Within the context of the Sudan, however, even Arabic-speaking Egyptians were considered Turks, and the term Ottoman Egyp- tians may seem more problematic.

Given the repeated, and now even stronger, references to race that Sanua's characters make in both these plays, it is startling that so many analysts of these texts ignore the allusions completely. While I accept the thesis of Jacob Landau, who traced in Studies in Arab Theater and Cinema the tradition of car- icaturing the accents of the Sudanese in Arabic, I notice that little if anything has been said about Sanua's political uses of this tradition and the identification of racial or ethnic difference among his characters.

His capabilities as a military leader were very clear to the British public, but he was covered by a cloud of suspicion as a result of slave raids and slave trading in the regions of the Sudan that he had controlled. His son's assassination by Gessi Pasha, one of the governors appointed by Gordon, was a sad act that made al- Zubayr's loyalties even harder to ascertain. Finally, in 1900, Lord Cromer allowed al-Zubayr Pasha to return to the Sudan.

6. Ibid., p. 127. 7. Hiläl, Al-raqïq fï misr fi-l-qarn al-täsi ashr, p. 278. 8. Ibid., p. 128. 9. Al-Aqad, "Muhammad Imäm al-Abd," p. 111. 10. Hiläl, Al-raqïq fï misr fi-l-qarn al-täsi ashr, p. 281. 11. Al-Aqad, "Muhammad Imäm al-Abd," p. 111. 12. Hiläl, Al-raqïq fï misr fi-l-qarn al-täsi ashr, p. 280. 13. Ibid., p. 112. 14. Al-Rafii, Thawra al-sana 1919, pp. 73–75. 15. Ibid., p. 76. 16. Berque, Egypt, pp. 306–7. 17. Sharawï, Harem Years, pp. 113–20. 18. Shafïk, Hawliyät Misr al-siyäsiya, Tamhid, pp. 247–49. 19. Sabry, La Revolution égyptienne, p. 23. 20. Since the first, deeply enthusiastic, accounts of the 1919 revolution writ- ten by the historian and eyewitness Muhammad Sabry in its immediate after- math, the uprising has undergone many different interpretations within Egyptian historiography. Abd al-Rahman al-Rafii's Thawra al-sana 1919, a classic and detailed account, was first published during the twilight of King Farouq's reign; its second printing followed Gamal Abd al-Nasr's establishment of an independent government by three years.Al-Rafii's book went far in keep- ing the legend of Sad Zaghlül untarnished (and unexplored). While a strong belief in the nationalist movement continues among Egyptian historians, the idea of the events of 1919 having formed a "revolution" is currently in question, as evidenced by the 1992 conference on 1919, held at the American University in Cairo and sponsored jointly by that school and Cairo University.