ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Egyptian writer Rifa’a Al-Tahtawi's views on race and blackness in his writings on Sudan that coincided with Muhammed Ali's invasion of Sudan, and in light of Egyptian nationalism as well as the newly disseminated European theories of race. A reading of Tahtawi's writings reveals assumptions about racial essences and a reliance on abstract notions of Arab identity that betray utopian visions of purity. The chapter draws on Sara Ahmed's and bell hooks’ ideas of whiteness to describe the way Tahtawi characterizes blackness as visible and Arab whiteness as invisible. His use of the phrase “white Arabs” shows that to him race is not merely a Western-imposed construct. The language he uses is indicative of the way he understands race, which proves that the race question in Egypt is also a question of language. His rhetoric of racial and cultural difference when he describes Blacks as wild and menacing reflects a kind of culturalist racism, given that he not only essentializes the Sudanese's physical characteristics (blackness) but also their culture. The chapter draws on Michelle Wright's and Stuart Hall's view of diaspora to challenge Tahtawi's essentialist assumptions that race, ethnicity, and religion possess an immutable and fixed essence.
