For the Love of Lost Sovereignty: Egypt and Postcolonial Thought

Shaden Tageldin’s fascinating book from 2011 makes use of styles of analysis drawn from literary critics and theorists associated with post-colonial thought—Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha—but foregrounds an implicit comparison between India and Egypt, stressing the profound distinctiveness of the Egyptian example. Rather than the predominant emphasis on difference between Briton and Indian in the South Asian context, this colonial encounter begins with Napoleon proclaiming in a French document (ambiguously translated into Arabic), “nous sommes amis des vrais musulmans”: either “we are friends of the true Muslims” or, more interestingly, “we are friends, true Muslims” (33). These become the “disarming words” invoked by the title of this work, words meant to preempt and preclude a Hegelian fight to the death; in this colonial romance, the colonized is “seduced” into loving a better version of himself, which he sees in the colonizer. She argues that the colonized male (this text pays close attention to sexual identification throughout) sees an improved, more rigorous—if more effete—version of his own culture, indeed of himself, in the colonizer. One gets the sense that Tageldin must have been struck as she worked through her Arabic material with the almost comic contrasts with South Asian exemplars: instead of an effeminate Bengali produced in English prose as a differend to British colonial masculinity, in the Arabic texts she cites from Hasan al-Attar (who for a time was rector of al-Azhar), it is the young, white French male who is an effeminate, even beautiful, object of (male) desire.

Her relish at al-Attar’s inversion is apparent, when she cites his description of this “group of [French] youths … who rose like suns, swaying with the lilt of a bride” on whose heads are unfurled “locks of hair” (71). It recalls the nearly contemporary contrast made by Edmund Burke in his “Speech on Fox’s East India Bill” when he complains of similar British youths being sent to India and lording over large territories with little experience or restraint. His complaint (also touching on hair): “The natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives” (al-Attar’s text is from 1799, while Burke’s remark is from 1783) (Burke 5:402). Burke’s fear is of an unrestrained male despot under whom cower Indian natives; al-Attar’s French youths hardly menace—by contrast they “seduce” by reversing the scene of colonial mimicry (Tageldin frequently refers to this notion from Bhabha); they miraculously speak Arabic “free of any accent,” and complete the poetic allusions which al-Attar unwittingly initiates in an exchange with them. It exemplifies for Tageldin the feminization of the Occident in some Arabic texts and illustrates how “the Eastern male intellectual might prove his virility by styling the west ‘female’” (74).

Tageldin argues for a shift away from the Althusserian idea of interpellation to understand the colonial encounter and instead argues (as these examples illustrate) for the concept of seduction as understood by Jean Baudrillard. What that means here in the Egyptian context is a “seduction that proceeds through translation” (79). Her theoretical aim and claim is to re-read Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as a scene of “translational seduction,” and the book frequently returns to a Hegelian model juxtaposed with and critiqued by Fanon’s reading in Black Skin, White Masks of a racial encounter with the other. Al-Attar’s amorous and homoerotic description is effectively a “declaration of love to the colonizer” (104), but she suggests that the native (according to this model from Baudrillard) is in love not so much with the French, as with his own lost sovereignty. The seduction tale, in her reading, is one that the colonized tells himself as a face-saving plot. “The seduction plot … recasts capitulation to the colonizer as agency” (76), as she puts it. Instead of ‘he mastered me,’ [End...