It might seem obvious that it’s good to read in ways that are literary, critical and modern. But Michael Allan argues that viewing certain ways of reading as literary, critical and modern also involves constructing a stereotype of a bad reader who is unliterary, uncritical and backwards. In colonial Egypt, British authorities relied on stereotypes of Islamic reading practices to treat local people as merely memorising and repeating what they read. As a result, local people were considered incapable of thinking critically and of holding valid political opinions.
Bonus clip
Click here to listen to Michael describing how the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz shows a young man and his parents clashing over how to read Charles Darwin.
Works mentioned
– Haidar Haidar, A Feast for the Seaweeds
– Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
– Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), Modern Egypt
– Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy
Further reading
Max Rodenbeck at New York Review of Books – Witch Hunt in Egypt
The Guardian – Looking back at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Rohen d’Aiglepierre, Clothilde Hugon and Hamidou Dia at The Conversation – Arab-Islamic education in Sub-Saharan Africa: going beyond clichés to build the future
Shashi Tharoor at The Guardian – ‘But what about the railways …?’ The myth of Britain’s gifts to India
Reza Aslan at Slate – How To Read the Quran
Valerie Stivers at Paris Review – Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz
Ursula Lindsey at The Nation – The World of the Alley: Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo