Christians and non-Saidi Islamists pose more sophisticated challenges to the incumbent elite, whose legitimating myth is grounded in Egyptian or greater Arab identity, because they are not exclusively of the rural hinterland and because they do enjoy international connections and support. Coptic communities in the West, especially in Australia, Canada, and the United States, have become increasingly vociferous in their efforts to bring pressure to bear on the Egyptian government to cease and desist from discriminating against Copts and to defend them more effectively from the depredations of radical Islamist activists. Coptic identity, reinforced by its growing internationalism, is also supported domestically by the emergence of a younger generation of political activists who draw upon the Coptic clergy, monasteries, and their own modern skills to both articulate their Copticness and to organize it into a movement. The almost complete exclusion of Copts from Egyptian political and governmental institutions, including the officer corps of the military and security services, has fired the flames of Coptic resentment, thereby reinforcing a distinctive identity.

The Islamist challenge is yet more profound than the Coptic one, given its potential appeal to a larger proportion of the population. The government has, accordingly, devoted more resources to the task of seeking to contain Islamism. On the one hand it has sought to reconcile Islamist and Egyptian or Arab nationalist identities, principally through inducements and accommodations intended to demonstrate that Islamism, in its less radical variants, is consistent with Egyptian Arab nationalism and that policies reflecting the two identities are similar if not identical. On the other hand it is has sought to portray radical Islamism as both un-Islamic and un-Egyptian, hence unworthy of engagement, except by security forces.

The existence of an increasingly visible and vocal group of “haves,” like the far larger social formation of “have nots,” also poses a challenge to the official political identity of Egyptian nationalism in that the “haves,” whose wealth increasingly is generated from external economic relations, whether through agency agreements, trade, or employment in foreign companies operating in Egypt, are steadily becoming more Westernized or globalized. For many of these haves, the residue of radical Egyptian Arab nationalism is unconvincing, unappealing, and deemed counterproductive for them as individuals and for Egypt as a whole. These are the citizens of “McWorld” who wear their nationalism lightly and find the amorphous identity of a globalized middle- or upper-class consumer sufficient for their purposes, which are more economic than political, for they remain on the sidelines of the Egyptian political game anyway. The Nasserist corporatism that found room for national capitalists within the overall identity of Egyptian Arabism and allotted to them a specific, if nominal role in the political economy, has now been outgrown, for today’s capitalists are almost necessarily not nationalist but internationalist, taking their cues as much from abroad as domestically.

Redefining Identity

Religious, political, and economic subcleavages, whose very existence was essentially denied during the heyday of radical Arab nationalism, have re-entered Egyptian historians’ frames of reference as the social formations resulting from those cleavages have been able to impart more of their distinctive identities to their members. Heterogeneity of political identity, both historically and today, is thus a perception increasingly shared. Yet the prevailing officially endorsed and propagated identity remains predicated on a homogeneity that does not obtain objectively or subjectively. Like many other nations, Egypt thus confronts the choice of whether or not to try to recast the national political identity in either a more inclusive or exclusive direction. But either option requires strong political institutions. To broaden the acceptable definition of who is an Egyptian would require institutions of the type that facilitate compromise and consensus based on the recognition of difference. To induce the citizenry to subscribe to a new monolithic, homogeneous identity would require mobilizational institutions of still greater capacity than those presently most capable, which are not governmental, but Islamist.

The second reality that bedevils the transition of political identity to a post-nationalist phase, whether more inclusive or exclusive, is this lack of political traditions and institutions capable of facilitating that task, which is not an easy one even in long established western democracies, as some contemporary European cases suggest. Marginalization of ethnic minorities in France and Germany, for example, combined with the rise of the radical, chauvinist political right, have rendered the emergence of a multicultural French or German identity extremely problematical. Even in the New World, where political traditions support continual redefinitions of national identity through the inclusion of new groups, the task of legitimating a multicultural national identity is taxing the capacity of institutions at all levels of government. Egypt does not face the prospect of having to redefine its national political identity as a multicultural one, but it does have to take account of the growing gap between an Egyptian and Arab identity suffused with Islam, on the one hand and, on the other, increasingly vociferous and discontented Christian and regional minorities. Also discontented are the ever more “globalized” economic elites and impoverished masses, among whom those who condemn the government for failing to totally Islamicize the political community are claiming leadership.

The Egyptian state’s options in the face of this challenge appear to be threefold. The first, which is the strategy presently employed, is essentially to ignore or even suppress the issue, reacting when required to specific threats or opportunities, but undertaking no bold initiatives and frustrating attempts by others to raise questions concerning political identity. Whereas Nasser emphasize the Arab and Sadat the Egyptian character of national political identity, Mubarak, more of an administrator than politician by nature, has deemed the issue both irrelevant to the day –to-day management of the ship of state and potentially divisive. From his perspective, grappling with political identity would be a lose-lose endeavor. So political identity is not a subject about which debate is encouraged, as the furore surrounding the Ibn Khaldun Center’s ill-fated proposed 1995 conference on minorities in Egypt and the subsequent arrest, trials, convictions, and imprisonment of its Director, Saad al Din Ibrahim, demonstrates.

An alternative approach to revivifying the official political identity and making it accord more closely with the reality of an increasingly heterogeneous, even factionalized body politic, would be to empower the political system to address issues relevant to that identity. While opposition political parties are able to propound alternative conceptualizations of Egypt’s identity, their ability to act upon those beliefs, other than to remonstrate on the pages of their newspapers, is very limited. Parliament, further marginalized as a result of the three elections since 1990 that have produced overwhelming victories for the ruling party, is not a forum in which either lofty or mundane issues with direct or indirect relevance to national identity are considered in a manner that engages the nation and helps to intensify feelings of identity, whether official or otherwise. Local government is virtually moribund, so there are no authoritative public arenas in which contesting identities and the policy preferences associated with them can be expressed and contested. This of course does not prevent the growth of alternative identities within the social formations mentioned above and the organizations and groupings largely comprised within those formations.