Shared grievance against Turkish military elites forged Egyptian national consciousness

Evidence

Mehmed Ali’s army was instrumental in founding the modern Egyptian nation not by enlightening its soldiers as to their true and hidden identity. It was not by fighting their supposedly foreign enemies that Egyptians came to call Egypt their own. Rather, by relying on thousands of Egyptians to man his army, and at the same time by making sure that none of these evlad-ɩ Arab was to be promoted to senior ranks, the Pasha inadvertently helped to homogenize the experience of these thousands of Egyptians in a manner that was crucial in the founding of their “imagined community.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1693