EGYPT: MORE ARAB THAN AFRICAN

In July 2007 I was commissioned by CNN to produce a feature story on Egyptian identity. The four-minute piece was to air on CNN’s Inside Africa, a weekly show that takes pride in showing viewers the ‘real’ Africa in all its diversity, rich heritage, and culture. My producer in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time was Cynthia Nelson, an African-American. She asked me to devote my four-minute piece to whether Egyptians really consider themselves Africans.

I hired a camera crew and set out on my mission, thinking I would only prove the obvious: Wasn’t Egypt in North Africa? Therefore, Egyptians are Africans. But it wasn’t simply a matter of geographical location - the issue turned out to be much more complex than that. I did not know it at the time but I was to be most astonished at what I would soon discover.

I spent the next couple of days interviewing hundreds of Egyptians – not just academics and researchers but also laymen and women in different districts in Cairo — asking how they view themselves. My question raised a few eyebrows among people on the streets, the majority of whom replied "I’m a Muslim Arab, of course” or “an Arab Muslim.” They shrugged their shoulders and looked perplexed as they responded for wasn’t it an already-known fact that Egyptians are Arabs and that Egypt has a majority Muslim population? A few of the interviewees said that they “were descendants of the Pharoahs” but surprisingly, none in the sample interviewed thought of themselves as Africans.

Their responses led me to contemplate the conceptual Sahara divide. For centuries, the Sahara Desert has been viewed as a vast impenetrable barrier dividing our continent into two distinct areas: Northern “white” and sub-Saharan “black” Africa. The countries south of the Sahara have long been considered authentically “African” while those to the north have been perceived as Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Islamic. While most anthropologists refute this perception of Africa as “inaccurate”, it has nevertheless, influenced the way people think about the continent and our region in particular. Apparently, it has also impacted the way Egyptians view themselves.

Many Egyptians are oblivious to their “African-ness", failing to identify themselves as Africans. When confronted with the reality of their African roots, some Egyptians are stunned, others reluctant to acknowledge the fact. Though I hate to admit it, we are a racist people. African refugees living in Egypt often complain of discrimination and verbal and physical harassment on the streets. Egyptians look down on darker-skinned sub-Saharans as their “inferiors,” they claim. Historian Jill Kamel confirms this, explaining that it may be attributed to the fact that across generations, Egypt’s elite community was made up mostly of lighter-skinned Egyptians whereas the underprivileged Egyptians were those toiling under the hot sun to earn their bread. “Egyptians have thus come to associate fair skin with elitism,” she said.

The nationalist pan-Arabism ideology promoted by the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the fifties and sixties led his supporters (the Nasserists) to take pride in their Arab identity. The notion of pan- Arabism gained wider acceptance in the seventies when, in the wake of the Gulf oil boom, millions of Egyptians traveled to oil-rich Gulf states to earn their livelihoods. They adopted many of the habits of the host countries, bringing home a new conservatism which was reflected in their style of dress and mannerisms. Author and writer Galal Amin discusses the impact of Wahhabism, a rigid form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, on Egyptian culture at length in his book Whatever Happened to the Egyptians, a two-part series that chronicles the changes brought about by the mass exodus to the Gulf in the seventies.

While the signs of increasing piety may indeed be the result of peer pressure, a political statement against the West’s policies vis-a-vis the Middle East or even economic, the fact remains that the signs of ‘Islamisation’ of the society are increasing.

Excerpt from Shahira Amin on DailyNewsEgypt com, September 6, 2012