Shared resentment against Turkish officers, not foreign wars, forged Egyptian national identity.

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.” The deeply felt sentiments of injustice, frustration and animosity that the Arabic-speaking soldiers and their junior officers had towards the Turkish-speaking military elite was a powerful ingredient in forging the rising national consciousness and was made even more potent by being echoed in the civilian society at large. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1693

Categorization

• XREF: Directly applies Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ framework with a contrarian twist: homogenization came through shared grievance against an internal elite, not through fighting external enemies.