Ottoman Egypt Demands Independence: Egyptian Identity, East and West, Christian and Muslim

Abstract

Egypt was yet another site for the production of a discourse on Japanese modernity, though the ways in which Japan was depicted in press and literature in Egypt reflected not only a different set of social and political circumstances informing the attitudes of writers there, but the aims of such a discourse diverged at times from those of their Ottoman Turkish and Arab contemporaries as well. The number of newspapers and journals published in Cairo, the relative freedom of expression these papers enjoyed for several decades, and the availability of other forms of literary expression allow for a thorough examination of Japanese images and their particular usage in Egyptian thought. Noticeable at first is that Egyptian nationalist writers did not embrace an overtly racialized understanding of themselves in the way that some of the Turkish nationalist ideologues did, and thus their discussions of Japan did not focus upon the Japanese as a biologically defined race of people. Second, Egypt had already developed a national consciousness specific to Egyptian heritage and geography. Journalists resident in Egypt did not use the Japanese trope to formulate identity in the same way that Ottoman Arabs in the provinces tended to do, with the exception of some Syrian Arab émigrés whose writings will be considered separately from those of Egypt’s nationalists. In contrast to the Ottoman Arab case, Egyptian nationalists’ writings on Japan centered less around identity-building issues that included comparisons between Islam as the moral foundation for the Arabs and Shinto-style ancestral worship for the Japanese, and more upon Japan’s accomplishments as a sovereign nation-state.