Egyptian nationalism historically oscillated between Pharaonic and Arab self-identification

Evidence

The Egyptian nation? This raises another and interesting question. For a long time now the Egyptians have been suffering from what American psychologists and literary critics call “a crisis of identity.” Are they Egyptians or are they Arabs? In the past they were quite happy to be simply Muslims or Copts, without worrying about a national designation. But in the modern world this is no longer adequate. There have been periods when they identified themselves—at least politically—as Egyptians, as inhabitants and citizens of a country called Egypt, which should find its political expression in an Egyptian state. During that period Egyptian intellectuals were inclined to argue that the fact that they spoke Arabic did not make them Arabs, any more than Mexicans were Spaniards or Americans were Englishmen. They expressed attitudes varying from sympathy to contempt for the Arabs of the East, but clearly differentiated themselves from them. They were Egyptians—the proud and legitimate heirs of the ancient glo­ ries of Pharaonic Egypt. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1253

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Islam-West representation cluster — the constructed dialectic between Egyptian and Arab identity parallels Said’s account of invented identities serving political projects.
• QUESTION: The borrowing of ‘crisis of identity’ from American psychology is itself a telling act of Western hermeneutics being applied to the Arab world — worth pursuing who imported that frame.