A Battle of Civilizations: The Irish Press and the Egyptian Wars, 1882–85
Drawing on a larger study of reporting on British expeditions to Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s in some 200 late-Victorian periodicals, this paper will examine the ways in which Irish newspapers understood and presented Islam and Muslims to their readers. Much, but not all, of the Irish press opposed British intervention in Egypt and the Sudan in 1882-1885. But even those most critical of the British invasions still accepted and promulgated dominant conceptions of Egypt and indeed most of the Islamic world as decayed, corrupt, and premodern. For many observers in the late-Victorian press these conflicts thus represented a clash between the modern and rational West and the forces of unreason, servility, and superstition that had long held Muslim peoples in their grasp. Only through British intervention and perhaps an extended guardianship, they argued, could these influences be eradicated and northeast Africa brought into the modern world. While those critical of British involvement contested the idea that Western values might be spread at the point of a bayonet, they did not challenge the hierarchy of civilization inherent in the dominant British response to these events. Their criticism of British actions sought not to demolish this hierarchy but rather secure a place for Ireland in its first ranks. This paper will demonstrate that Irish journalists and their readers were fully engaged imperial citizens participating in a dense, multivalent conversation about their government’s interventions in northeast Africa and explore what these conflicts revealed to Irish journalists about the nature of Islam and the capacity of Muslims for national feeling and political development. In the process it will shed light on the scope, nature, and limits of Irish anti- and pro-imperial ideology.