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.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 349