One pith-helmeted English gentleman who rose to the occasion was Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer, more famously known as Lord Cromer. When Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, Cromer was entrusted to oversee the occupation. He wrote that "Islam as a social system has been a complete failure. . . . The degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam." The solution was that Muslims "be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization." At home, this champion of Egyptian women's rights worked feverishly to deny British women the right to vote as a founding member and president of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. This was not a contradiction for Cromer, who was a social conservative at home but an enlightened colonizer abroad. As a colonial overlord, he was not putting forward a statement of principle but rather simply deploying arguments useful to the colonial mission.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of 'saving brown women from brown men' (Spivak) and how colonial rhetoric co-opts liberation discourse. QUESTION: How widely did this pattern recur across other British colonial holdings, and what rhetorical strategies parallel it today in humanitarian intervention discourse?

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 165