Sunday's Read: Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930

Gershoni, Israel and James Jankowski. Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930. (Oxford University Press, 1987)

This leads naturally into the discussion of the three books on different elements of early Egyptian nationalism helmed by the redoubtable Gershoni and Jankowski, examined here both in order of publication and in chronological order of the time periods that they cover. As in all their work, they demonstrate an encyclopedic knowledge of Egyptian popular literature, periodicals, and the public sphere throughout the first half of the twentieth century. First, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 (1987) examines the many competing fin de siècle political and identitarian movements to which Elshakry was alluding above. Moving through various discursive and ideological persuasions, Egyptian nationalism post-World War I settled into a territorialist secular discourse. With the final collapse of the Ottomans during the war, Ottomanism had been removed from consideration. “Easternism,” though claiming some adherents, was too nebulously defined, and Islamism and Arabism did not have enough traction to compete with the biases of the westernized political elites. “Egyptianism” emerged triumphant. Of the many, copiously noted concepts that Gershoni and Jankowski detail throughout The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, the one that perhaps best illustrates Elshakry’s concerns about the elision of the past is addressed in their Part II: the deliberate construction and perpetuation through the press of a bitter, shockingly negative characterization of the idea of “Arab.” Gershoni and Jankowski emphasize that this was an intentional “counterimage” designed to promote the ideal of “Egyptianness.” Its utter eclipse in later discourses of Arab pride and unity illustrates the changeableness and ephemerality of prevailing cultural climates.