Supra-Egyptian Islamic and Pan-Arab identities and acculturated Muslim Egyptian intellectuals, 1892-1952

Abstract

This dissertation surveys the development of pan-Islamic and pan-Arab identifications among two main groups of Westernizing-educated intellectuals: (a) those in the independence movement launched by Mustafa Kamil (to 1918) and (b) that around the newspapers al-Jaridah (1908-1914) of the Ummah Party and then, after 1922, around the successor al-Siyasah and Party of Liberal Constitutionalists. Our focus on the conflict and interblending of Arab and Western high cultures stresses impoverishing and positive educational and aesthetic experiences in the age of imperialism as the motive for the pan-Islamic and pan-Arab identification that this Muslim Egyptian elite built up. Book 1 (1892-1918). The literature has over-stressed Egyptianist and pan-Islamic attitudes in Kamil's Hizb al-Watani and Egyptianist and secularoid ones from Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid's al-Jaridah --- doubly neglecting pre-1918 Egyptian Arabism. This study details respectful or at least very engaged evocation from both groups of "the [classical] Arab Nation". Neither group rigorously articulated a contemporary Arab successor-community, but we review proto-pan-Arab interactions and disorderly transitional terminology in contexts of Arab World literary activity that did point forward to the later post-1922 modern pan-Arab nation. Despite it~ particularoid homeland frame, pre-1913 Egyptian political nationalism already had features more like linguistic nationalism. Dual-cultured, both Kamilist and al-Jaridah writers became more and more aware of modern sectors of life that the standard literary Arabic of the classical Arabs had to be extended to cover. They made the ultra-politicized Qur'an-defined deterritorializing high Arabic their rallying-ground of struggle against the British. Language only instanced how extensively the intellectuals had, by 1914, integrated their Arab-Islamic and modern make-up. Kamilist pan-Islam, a spiritual stage ahead of Western nationalisms, had already synthesized the global technology and economic drives of imperialism into the chipped-down essence of Islam's wide community impulse. standard Arabic independence. It assesses al-Siyasah alternation or conflict --- but, again, also Kamilist-like blending and synthesis --- between (a) secularoid Western and (b) politicized classical Arab and Islamic motifs. Post-1922 Zionism again alternated and blended this elite's two cultures. Real data and prejudices from Western polities about Jews there blended into (b) Islam's old community concepts and shrines to (c) define Zionism as an internationally coherent Darwinian enemy. Our examinations of the growth of pan-Arabism into Egypt's official community ideology in the 1930s and 1940s show it was still often fitting well into Western liberal cultures and technology. The new post-1930 establishment Arabism was only sectionally neo-classical: advancing to a purely linguistic nationhood, it dropped fondness for Arab race or lineage in the classical high literature and in Egyptian villages in order to integrate the diverse Arabic-speaking populations (using the West's economic and technological modernity). Although the intellectuals still developed affinities and outreaches to wider non-Arab Muslim and Eastern peoples, the inner more unitary political community is gradually contracted and separated to within the sphere of daily Arabic speech (we concentrate on Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat). The classical Arabs' language had some less Islamic literature and extending it to cover all modernity was a joint enterprize of Muslim Egyptian and non-Egyptian Christian Arab intellectuals. Despite patches of transformation from the positivist West, however, Islam held as a community basis for the Muslim intellectuals: they could not carry through a fusion with Copt~ within abortive post~1922 neo-Pharaonic particularism and in the 1930s and 1940s failed to adequately perceive within political decolonization West Asian Christian Arab groups that they culturally appreciated. Show more