What then if the ungrateful native should choose self-rule over the enlightened colonial overlord? What was Balfour's Britain to make of the movements for national liberation then starting to emerge in Egypt, India, and other colonized nations? Such struggles for self-determination had to be explained away. One way this was done was to assert that the leaders of these movements were misguided agitators who could not understand what was in their own best interests. As Cromer argued, "the real future of Egypt . . . lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism, which will only embrace native Egyptians . . . but rather in that of an enlarged cosmopolitanism." In other words, the subject people should shut up and realize that they are better off as members of the global British Empire.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 204