Yoav Fromer: The Nation-State in Egypt
[Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for the Israeli daily Maariv.]
While thousands of angry Egyptians swarmed into Cario’s Tahrir Square late last month and began the 18-day standoff that would eventually force the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, several dozen of their countrymen had other things on their mind. Instead of protesting for their freedoms, these Egyptians were protecting something of equal if not even more value to them: their heritage. After looters attempted to take advantage of the ongoing pandemonium and break into the Egyptian Museum, which houses many of the country’s priceless artifacts from its ancient past, a group of concerned Cairo citizens mobilized to secure the premises and formed a human ring around the museum. “Egyptians love their history,” explained Egypt’s minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass. “It’s the one thing that unites the country.”...
Although we tend to associate Arab nationalism with some of the worst dictatorial regimes of the 20th century (Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party being the most notorious), in an ironic twist of fate so characteristic of the unpredictable Middle East, it appears that what had once been thought of as part of the problem has now become part of the solution: With the forces of radical Islam lurking in the background and potentially threatening to hijack the revolution, Egyptian nationalism may very well be the primary bulwark that could prevent that from happening....
Long before nationalism in its modern 19th-century European guise was introduced into the Middle East, Egyptians already held a pretty good idea of what the term meant. As proud descendants of the ancient lineages of Tutankhamen and Cleopatra, they were able to coalesce around a shared set of myths, traditions, and symbols that have continually supplied them with a basic collective identity—one that miraculously persevered despite recurring foreign conquests by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, and Europeans. United by their primordial attachments to the shared climate, geography, archeology, culture, and history of the Nile river valley, Egyptians were able to establish a palpable though inchoate sense of nationality that no neighboring peoples, with the possible exception of the Jews, were able to sustain over such a long period of time. As the historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot wrote in her seminal account of Egypt: “The native Egyptian, while coping with alien rulers, also clung to the fixed piece of territory that he identified and knew as Egypt. Even before the age of nationalism made people conscious of national affinities Egyptians were conscious of living in a land called Egypt.”
When modernity began to permeate the land of the pharaohs with the arrival of French and British armies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, modern ideas of nationalism quickly followed suit. They found in Egypt fertile ground in which to take root. While still under Ottoman and then de-facto British rule, Egyptians defiantly mobilized and revolted (in 1881 and 1919) in pursuit of national self-determination. Although these nationalist uprisings eventually succeeded in expelling the British and creating an independent state, it was only after the 1952 free officers’ coup put an end to the last Ottoman dynasty in Egypt, which had been founded by the ethnically Albanian general Muhammad Ali, that Egyptians finally had the opportunity to rule themselves.
It was no coincidence that once this happened, the collected identity that Egyptians had gradually constructed since ancient times blossomed into a radical nationalist ideology. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the coup and would eventually also ascend to the presidency, was an astute student of modern European nationalism—a fact accentuated by his ambitious efforts to apply a European-style model to Egypt in the hope that this would allow it to reclaim its long-lost place of honor. Nasser’s own magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Revolution, reads like a standard nationalist manifesto infused with romantic paeans to the beloved motherland. In it, he calls upon Egyptians to take up what Nasser referred to as the “role of the hero” and embrace their destiny to lead the Arab world. “This role, exhausted by its wanderings, has at last settled down, tired and weary, near the borders of our country and is beckoning us to move,” Nasser wrote.
His nearly 15-year presidency and the proceeding four decades of rule by his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were in many ways an attempt to live up to and accomplish Nasser’s grand aspirations for securing Egypt’s place in the world and regenerating its national spirit. With the help of monumental state-sponsored projects like the construction of the Aswan Dam, the creation of the short-lived Egyptian-led United Arab Republic, Egypt’s vocal leadership role in the non-aligned movement during the Cold War (and its outward defiance before both superpowers), and especially its frequent military conflicts with Israel, Nasser and his successors were able to revive and solidify a coherent sense of Egyptian nationalism that proudly took upon itself that exceptional, heroic role Nasser envisioned for it decades earlier. (Egyptians’ conviction in their chosen nation status was reinforced by the international success of Egyptian cultural icons like the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the world-famous singer Umm Kulthum.)...
Read entire article at Tablet Magazine
While thousands of angry Egyptians swarmed into Cario’s Tahrir Square late last month and began the 18-day standoff that would eventually force the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, several dozen of their countrymen had other things on their mind. Instead of protesting for their freedoms, these Egyptians were protecting something of equal if not even more value to them: their heritage. After looters attempted to take advantage of the ongoing pandemonium and break into the Egyptian Museum, which houses many of the country’s priceless artifacts from its ancient past, a group of concerned Cairo citizens mobilized to secure the premises and formed a human ring around the museum. “Egyptians love their history,” explained Egypt’s minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass. “It’s the one thing that unites the country.”...
Although we tend to associate Arab nationalism with some of the worst dictatorial regimes of the 20th century (Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party being the most notorious), in an ironic twist of fate so characteristic of the unpredictable Middle East, it appears that what had once been thought of as part of the problem has now become part of the solution: With the forces of radical Islam lurking in the background and potentially threatening to hijack the revolution, Egyptian nationalism may very well be the primary bulwark that could prevent that from happening....
Long before nationalism in its modern 19th-century European guise was introduced into the Middle East, Egyptians already held a pretty good idea of what the term meant. As proud descendants of the ancient lineages of Tutankhamen and Cleopatra, they were able to coalesce around a shared set of myths, traditions, and symbols that have continually supplied them with a basic collective identity—one that miraculously persevered despite recurring foreign conquests by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, and Europeans. United by their primordial attachments to the shared climate, geography, archeology, culture, and history of the Nile river valley, Egyptians were able to establish a palpable though inchoate sense of nationality that no neighboring peoples, with the possible exception of the Jews, were able to sustain over such a long period of time. As the historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot wrote in her seminal account of Egypt: “The native Egyptian, while coping with alien rulers, also clung to the fixed piece of territory that he identified and knew as Egypt. Even before the age of nationalism made people conscious of national affinities Egyptians were conscious of living in a land called Egypt.”
When modernity began to permeate the land of the pharaohs with the arrival of French and British armies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, modern ideas of nationalism quickly followed suit. They found in Egypt fertile ground in which to take root. While still under Ottoman and then de-facto British rule, Egyptians defiantly mobilized and revolted (in 1881 and 1919) in pursuit of national self-determination. Although these nationalist uprisings eventually succeeded in expelling the British and creating an independent state, it was only after the 1952 free officers’ coup put an end to the last Ottoman dynasty in Egypt, which had been founded by the ethnically Albanian general Muhammad Ali, that Egyptians finally had the opportunity to rule themselves.
It was no coincidence that once this happened, the collected identity that Egyptians had gradually constructed since ancient times blossomed into a radical nationalist ideology. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the coup and would eventually also ascend to the presidency, was an astute student of modern European nationalism—a fact accentuated by his ambitious efforts to apply a European-style model to Egypt in the hope that this would allow it to reclaim its long-lost place of honor. Nasser’s own magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Revolution, reads like a standard nationalist manifesto infused with romantic paeans to the beloved motherland. In it, he calls upon Egyptians to take up what Nasser referred to as the “role of the hero” and embrace their destiny to lead the Arab world. “This role, exhausted by its wanderings, has at last settled down, tired and weary, near the borders of our country and is beckoning us to move,” Nasser wrote.
His nearly 15-year presidency and the proceeding four decades of rule by his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were in many ways an attempt to live up to and accomplish Nasser’s grand aspirations for securing Egypt’s place in the world and regenerating its national spirit. With the help of monumental state-sponsored projects like the construction of the Aswan Dam, the creation of the short-lived Egyptian-led United Arab Republic, Egypt’s vocal leadership role in the non-aligned movement during the Cold War (and its outward defiance before both superpowers), and especially its frequent military conflicts with Israel, Nasser and his successors were able to revive and solidify a coherent sense of Egyptian nationalism that proudly took upon itself that exceptional, heroic role Nasser envisioned for it decades earlier. (Egyptians’ conviction in their chosen nation status was reinforced by the international success of Egyptian cultural icons like the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the world-famous singer Umm Kulthum.)...