Cairo: Egypt\u2019s capital, the largest city in Africa, and our first married home
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is the seventh installment of an article that I wrote for\u00a0Richard C. Martin, et al., eds., \u00a0Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World<\/em>, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), on the subject of \u201cMuslim Identity\u201d:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Local patriotism did appear in Egypt, somewhat later than in Turkey, largely under the influence of Shaykh Rifa\u2018a Rafi\u2018 al-Tahtawi (d. 1873).\u00a0 In numerous odes and poems, al-Tahtawi, also fond of the formula \u201clove of country is part of the faith,\u201d praised Egypt, the Egyptian army and its soldiers, and the then-ruling dynasty of the khedives.\u00a0 While his works evince little or no interest in other Muslims or Arab-speakers beyond Egypt, the history and legacy of the pharaohs clearly fascinated him.\u00a0 They also served the complexly pan-Islamic purposes of al-Afghani, who praised the glories of pagan Egypt (as well as the ancient polytheistic Hindus) in polemics composed, unlike those of Kemal and the Young Ottomans, in Arabic.\u00a0 For their part, the khedives encouraged and even sponsored this new patriotism, since the cultivation of a distinctive Egyptian identity and personality so obviously furthered their own separatist ambitions, and the \u201cNational\u201d or \u201cPatriotic Party\u201d (al-hizb al-watani<\/i>) was founded in 1879.\u00a0 It cannot be maintained that the new Egyptian patriotism was wholly secular\u2014for most of its advocates, Islam was an essential part of Egyptian identity\u2014but it grounded a movement in which even non-Muslim Egyptians felt they could join.\u00a0 Thus, even prior to British occupation in 1882, the Christian journalist Selim Naqqash coined the slogan \u201cEgypt for the Egyptians,\u201d which was then popularized by the Jewish pamphleteer Abu Naddara and put into practical action by the Muslim soldier \u2018Urabi Pasha.\u00a0 On the other hand, the Syrian intellectuals and others who had taken refuge in the relatively open society of Egypt were often marginalized as \u201cintruders\u201d (dukhala\u2019<\/i>) by prominent Egyptian patriots.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSignificantly, it was chiefly Syrian immigrants who brought the idea of political Arabism to khedivial Egypt.\u00a0 Prominent among these were \u2018Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (d. 1902), perhaps the first to demand an Arab state headed by an Arab caliph independent of Ottoman Turkish rule, and Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935).\u00a0 On the whole, however, Egypt proved resistant to pan-Arabism, although that ideology played a substantial role during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (under whom, for a time during and after his abortive merger with Syria, the venerable name Egypt<\/i> was officially sacrificed in order to build a \u201cUnited Arab Republic.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\nAbd\u00fclhamid II\u2019s imperial pan-Islamism thus proved entirely unsuccessful.\u00a0 And, eventually, with the abolition of the sultanate in 1922 and of the caliphate in 1924, the last effective, legitimate political symbol of collective pan-Islamic identity disappeared.\u00a0 Former Ottoman Muslims found themselves residing in a disunited variety of nation-states, much as their descendents do today.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 This is the seventh installment of an article that I wrote for\u00a0Richard C. Martin, et al., eds., \u00a0Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), on the subject of \u201cMuslim Identity\u201d: \u00a0 Local patriotism did appear in Egypt, somewhat later than in Turkey, largely under the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Egypt's](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/05\/Nile_and_Cairo.jpg\")
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