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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Constituting the nation
By Margot Badran *
At this turn in the road, one ponders the century just past, the vast expanse before us and what we shall do with it. Who are the "we"? What is the nation?
The first half of the 20th century was lived under colonial occupation. The second was directed toward constituting a newly liberated nation. During this time there were stringent notions of who belonged, and who didn't.
The second half of the century saw vast migrations, as well as the creation of numerous Diaspora communities. Unprecedented numbers of Egyptians acquired nationality through choice, selling the numbers of citizens cast by birth. By late century, the nation began to look quite different. Black and white notions of citizenship, of belonging, gave way to multiple hues and blurrings.
Who is Egyptian became a more complicated question in an age when the idea and practice of a single nationality was increasingly anachronistic. Some still apply a facile litmus test of "national" identity, accepting only a tight coterie with a "proper ethnic" genealogy, mindless, among other things, of the insidious racism implicit here.
It is worrying that in Egypt some still atavistically insist on casting the nation in an anxiously proprietary way.
Such people must abandon the hysterical trope of the beleaguered "nation" and cease their exclusionary ranting in order to escape the fate of self-incarceration in an isolated (national) fortress at the dawn of the 21st century, which holds out promises for a vigorous multi-valenced nation, solid in itself and in solidarities beyond the self.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is an academic who has written extensively on women's issues.
