Egyptian nationalism in the late 1870s took several overlapping, mutually adopted forms

Evidence

Cultural self-respect was one of the most important aspects of the new pan- Islamist movement that sprang up among members of Egypt’s secular and religious intelligentsia around the time of the Uräbïya. As Alexander Scholch notes, the movement's ideas—which took shape amid terrible financial pressure suffered by both the Ottoman state and the Egyptian government—were, above all, the beginning of resistance to economic exploitation by the European powers. Scholch helpfully lists the different, intermingling shapes that the concept of nationalism took in Egypt of the late 1870s: “Ismaïl’s striving for independence, his imperial dreams, his attempt to resist European intervention with the help of a ‘national party’; genuine Egyptian patriotism; the ‘quasi-national’ ideas of a pan-Arab sociocultural risorgimento; pan-Islamic thought based on the religious authority of the Sultan; secularist endeavors to strengthen the Ottoman Empire in the East as a whole against the European danger. These ideas often overlapped, and sometimes they were adopted at the same time by one and the same person.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 451

Categorization

• DEFINE: Scholch’s list usefully taxonomizes the intermingling strands of late-1870s Egyptian nationalism, clarifying how the concept was not singular.
• XREF: Connects to reading on how economic exploitation by European powers catalyzed indigenous resistance, a thread across North African anticolonial movements.