Egyptian nationalist memory erases Ottoman rule by conflation with the Mamluks

Evidence

So what did Taymūr read in the Sphinx’s letter written in 1949? In that most telling letter he read a concise nationalist version of Egypt’s long history in which she appears as having a clear unadulterated identity that goes as far back as her pharaonic past, hence the language in which the letter is written and the Sphinx’s insistence that it is the dearest to his heart. But Egypt, personified in the city of Cairo, also has an Islamic component that is constitutive of her identity and which is here represented by al-Azhar and its minaret dominating the cityscape. Conspicuously absent from Taymūr’s version of Egypt’s history is a long period of over three centuries of Ottoman rule. Having avoided any explicit reference to this period by name, he conflates it with Mamluk rule to which he alludes when he has the Sphinx refer to the tutelage of the “Mamluk.” Echoing a widely believed notion, Taymūr refers to this period as one of oppression and tyranny. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 85

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete case of historiography-as-identity-construction, echoing similar erasure dynamics the reader knows from other colonial and post-colonial nationalisms.