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.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 130