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?

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 686