The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War

By Kyle J. Anderson

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. The Egyptian Labor Corps tells the forgotten story of these young men, culminating in the essential part they came to play in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.

Combining sources from archives in four countries, Anderson explores Britain’s role in Egypt during this period and how the ELC came to be, as well as the experiences and hardships these men endured. As he examines the ways they coped—through music, theater, drugs, religion, strikes, and mutiny—he illustrates how Egyptian nationalists, seeing their countrymen in a state akin to slavery, began to grasp that they had been racialized as “people of color.” Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781477324561

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THE EGYPTIAN LABOR CORPS

Race, Space, and Place in the First World War

KYLE J. ANDERSON

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Portions of chapter 2 were previously published as The Egyptian Labor Corps: Workers, Peasants and the State During World War I in The International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 no. 1 (January 2017).

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Anderson, Kyle J., author.

Title: The Egyptian Labor Corps : race, space, and place in the First World War / Kyle J. Anderson.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021022906

ISBN 978-1-4773-2454-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-14773-2455-4 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2456-1 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain. Army. Labour Corps—Minorities—History. | Great Britain. Army. Labour Corps—Minorities—Social conditions—History. | World War, 1914–1918—Conscript labor—Social aspects—Egypt. | Egyptians—Race identity—History. | World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Palestine. | World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Egypt—Sinai. | BISAC: HISTORY / Middle East / Egypt (see also Ancient / Egypt)

Classification: LCC UA668 .A64 2021 | DDC 940.4/124108992762—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022906

doi:10.7560/324547

To the thousands who lost their lives working with the Egyptian Labor Corps, Camel Transport Corps, Hired Camel Transport, Horse Transport, Imperial Camel Corps, and Camel Veterinary Corps.

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

A Note about Language

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. A Broken Promise

CHAPTER 2. The New Corvée

CHAPTER 3. From Home to the Front

CHAPTER 4. If This Is the Holy Land, What Must Hell Be Like?

CHAPTER 5. Race and Space in ELC Camps

CHAPTER 6. Listening in on the ELC

CHAPTER 7. The Men of the ELC Take Action

CHAPTER 8. I Will Not Accept Slavery!

CHAPTER 9. The ELC and the 1919 Revolution

CONCLUSION

Notes

References

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

I HAVE TRANSLITERATED WORDS from Modern Standard Arabic according to a system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). For proper nouns, including names and titles, I have omitted diacritics. For historical figures whose names have a common transliteration already circulating in English, I have included them in parentheses. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is transliterated according to a modified version of the IJMES system; instead of jim (j) I use (g), tha (th) becomes (ṣ) or (t), and qaf (q) becomes, at times, a hamza or glottal stop (’).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MILES DAVIS ONCE SAID, Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself. I jammed on the themes that appear in this book for many years before I started hitting what I hope are the right notes, and many people supported me along the way. First, I would like to thank my adviser and mentor, Ziad Fahmy. Ziad was the first person who told me about the Egyptian Labor Corps. His intellectual influence is clear in this work, but the most important lesson he taught me was how to be a professional academic while at the same time being a good human. Deborah Starr and Mostafa Minawi also helped me throughout my experience at Cornell. Getting this project published would not have been possible without the staff at the University of Texas Press, especially Jim Burr. The comments of the anonymous reviewers were immensely helpful and have been incorporated in different ways throughout the manuscript.

I was able to complete this research thanks to the generous support of a number of organizations. The Mario Einaudi Center at Cornell provided me with a Michele Sicca grant to visit the National Archives in London. The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) both contributed funding that allowed me to flesh out the story. ARCE in particular provided a supportive research environment in Cairo, with a cohort of fellows including Nefertiti Takla, Zoe Griffith, Andrew Simon, Mukharam Hhana, Jason Brownlee, and Noha Radwan. I am grateful to Khaled Fahmy, Madame Amira, and Mohamed Rabieh for helping me with my (rejected) application to the Egyptian National Archives, and I thank Latifa Salim and Ashraf Sabry for meeting with me while I was in Cairo and pointing me toward valuable primary sources. I would also like to thank the team behind Hawa’ al-Huriyya, including Laila Soliman, Alia Mossallam, and Zainab Magdy, for meeting with me and bringing important popular culture sources to my attention. Amr Shaaban Abdallah and Nermine Hassan Sayed were more than helpful at different stages throughout this project; they gave me insight into Egyptian culture and lasting friendship.

I am indebted to many professional colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who contributed in some way. In the early days of research, Nathan Brown, the late Ellis Goldberg, Jennifer Derr, Anna Maguire, Peter Gran, and Santanu Das all provided a helpful sounding board. Ilka Eickhof organized a reading group at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), which was a lifeline for me during my research. It was regularly attended by Claire Panetta, Patricia Kubala, Ian Steele, Edna Bonhomme, Lara Ayad, Farid Y. Farid, and Yakein Abdelmagid. At SUNY Old Westbury, I benefited from the thoughtful comments and professional examples set by my colleagues, including Juan Pablo Galvis, Judy Walsh, Sylvie Kande, Jingyi Song, Xavier Marecheaux, Chelsea Shields-Mas, Robert Mevissen, and Carol Quirke. In the summer of 2019, Neil Ketchley organized a workshop on interwar revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa that provided an important forum for me to work out my thoughts on the 1919 revolution. Hussein Omar, Aaron Jakes, Aula Hariri, Daniel Neep, Elena Vezzadini, and Katharine Halls all contributed to a great discussion.

I did not set out to write a book about race in Egypt, but as I looked at my sources, I found that race was the most important analytical lens through which contemporary observers made sense of the ELC. Working at SUNY Old Westbury and drafting this book in Bed-Stuy at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement has been a great setting to learn more about issues of race and racism. I began attending Llana Barber’s graduate seminar, Movements for Social Justice in US History, and I give Dr. Barber special thanks for her helpful comments on parts of the manuscript. I would like to thank Christopher S. Rose for his important research and his multiple contributions to this book, including the map in the front matter. Drafting the abstract to present this work with Frances Hasso also helped to refine my thinking. I want to thank Eve Troutt-Powell, Cemil Aydın, Bob Vitalis, Omnia El Shakry, and Marwa Elshakry for their pioneering research on race in modern Egypt and the broader Middle East. Without their work, this book would not have been possible.

Historians usually erase themselves from the texts they write, but this book has been, to some extent, an effort to make sense of my own personal experience living and working in Egypt. In little ways, I was constantly reminded that I was coded as a white foreigner (khawāga or agnābi). This gave me access to some resources and spaces, and likely closed off others. Nevertheless, I continuously passed over references to race in the sources I was reading, thinking that they were background noise distracting from the more serious business of analyzing workers’ class positions and cultural values. As I began to take these references more seriously, I turned away from an approach grounded in political economy primarily written in solidarity with the nationalist project and began to notice the deep isomorphism between concepts of race and nation at the time of the First World War. Those who disagree with this approach may see in this book another white foreigner exploiting Egypt’s historical resources for personal gain. It remains to be seen whether such skeptics can still find something of value in the pages that follow.

I am eternally grateful to my parents, Janice and John, who sacrificed for my education and helped instill in me a sense of ethical responsibility and intellectual curiosity. My mother’s editorial, intellectual, financial, and emotional support was crucial to starting and finishing this project. My sister, Whitney, and brother-in-law, Stephen, were always there for me during the many years it took to complete this book. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Maggie Landon, for reigniting my love of reading, and our dog, Rosie, for bringing so much joy to my life.

Map of Egypt by Christopher S. Rose. Used by permission.

INTRODUCTION

THE ADINKERKE MILITARY CEMETERY lies between France and Belgium, nestled in a patch of farmland that has, in recent years, seen the construction of a busy highway cutting through it. The cemetery can only be reached on foot by a fifty-meter-long grassy path, which passes through the farmland facing the highway. The cars whizzing by this small cluster of headstones obscure the fact that this was once the site of a casualty clearing station during the First World War. At this place, thousands of young men from nearby fronts were triaged and cared for. The unfortunate ones who never recovered are commemorated by headstones all made from Portland stone, a kind of smooth limestone used to build Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Roughly speaking, the space of the cemetery is organized the same way we organize the map of the globe today: by nationality. The entrance to the cemetery is in the southwest corner of the site. Taking an immediate left-hand turn, you can peruse long columns of headstones running north to south that commemorate the deaths of 222 men from Great Britain, the nations of the British Empire, and their allies. Further to the north of the site, you will find 142 graves of German forces and their allies, including a large subgroup of Czech soldiers, all arranged in rows running from east to west.

But if you go straight ahead instead of turning left, you may notice one solitary headstone tucked away in the southeast corner of the cemetery. Hidden under the shade of a tall tree and oriented eastward, so that you have to circle around facing toward the front entrance with your back to the highway in order to read it, is the headstone of Sabit Harun Mohamed. While the other graves in the site are adorned with crosses or national insignia, Mohamed’s is decorated with finely detailed Arabic calligraphy, signifying his status as the lone Muslim buried at Adinkerke: We are of God and to Him we shall return. Who was Sabit Harun Mohamed? How did he travel from his home to the northern shores of Belgium? And why does his headstone seem so out of place in this space organized by nation?

FIGURE 0.1. Gravestone of Sabit Harun Mohamed. Adinkerke Military Cemetery, Belgium, May 8, 2015, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adinkerke_Military_Cemetery04.jpg.

Unfortunately, documentary evidence does not provide enough information to reconstruct Mohamed’s life in great detail. He may have succumbed to injuries sustained in an air strike on the docks of nearby Dunkirk or Calais, where the German air force bombed a group of migrant laborers a few months before he died on September 6, 1917. Or he may have been working in the Fourth Army area, salvaging scrap metal and munitions behind the lines during the Third Battle of Ypres.¹ It is hard to say, because the grave registration reports—which contain many lines, if not full paragraphs, on the white soldiers buried at Adinkerke—tell us only his rank, the date of his death, and, in place of specifics, the name of the organization with which he served: the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC).²

Commemoration of deceased forces attached to the British Empire in the two World Wars was the responsibility of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC, renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960). The commission’s founder, Fabian Ware, established the principles that were to guide it going forward. In death, he wrote, all, from General to Private, of whatever race or creed, should receive equal honour under a memorial.³ Ware saw himself as a pioneer creating a new respect for the common soldier in a British army that had, only a century before, buried infantry troops and animals alike in open pits.⁴ Thomas Laqueur calls Ware’s style of remembrance commemorative hyper-nominalism, referring to the memorials he designed at the Western Front that include long lists of the names of British and Indian soldiers.⁵

But outside of Europe, the IWGC did not attach as much importance to the names of the dead. Memorials to the men of the ELC who died in Palestine contain only tablets inscribed in English and Arabic that state the total numbers of casualties buried nearby. One tablet in Haifa reads: ONE HUNDRED AND SIX MEN OF THE EGYPTIAN LABOUR CORPS ARE BURIED NEAR THIS SPOT.⁶ In her research on colonial war graves in British East Africa, Michèle Barret has found that the so-called principle of equal treatment espoused in the literature on the IWGC was violated consistently in the distinction between what officials called white graves and those of African natives.⁷ Similarly for the ELC, more than ten thousand are estimated to have died in service to the British Empire in Palestine, but according to IWGC records, only twenty-two hundred are buried in cemeteries there today.⁸ Most of the ELC men who died during the war remain unidentified, lying in unmarked graves. Sabit Harun Mohamed is, in this sense, one of the lucky ones; at least his body received a burial and commemoration. When it operated in spaces on the other side of the global color line, the IWGC, and the British Empire as whole, worked according to a different set of rules.

THE EGYPTIAN LABOR CORPS (ELC)

This book tells the forgotten story of the ELC. During the First World War, the British imposed martial law in Egypt and recruited approximately half a million young men like Sabit Harun Mohamed—mostly from the countryside, and many by force—to serve as military laborers in Europe and the Middle East. They worked as stevedores on the docks of France and Italy, dug trenches in Gallipoli, and drove camels laden with supplies in the deserts of Libya, Sudan, and the Sinai; they policed the inhabitants of occupied Baghdad, and in the advance through Palestine into Syria, which was the second-largest theater of the war, they provided the bulk of the military labor force.⁹ The ELC laid hundreds of miles of railway and water pipeline connecting Egypt and Palestine, which became the infrastructural foundations of the British Empire in the Middle East for a generation thereafter.

The Egyptian Labor Corps documents the experiences of these men in the war and follows them through to the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. Most importantly, it analyzes how they influenced, and were influenced by, contemporary ideas about the racial identity of Egyptians. Race was a crucial lens through which both British and Egyptian authorities viewed the men of the ELC. For the British and their allies, the ELC was just one part of the Coloured Labor Corps, and workers from Egypt served alongside others from places as far-flung as China, South Africa, India, Vietnam, the West Indies, and Fiji.¹⁰ This was the clearest example for the world to see what African Americans had recognized for at least a generation as the color line. In 1881, Frederick Douglass used the term to refer to the system of racial segregation in the American South after the failure of reconstruction.¹¹ It was first reformulated on a global scale by W. E. B. Du Bois in a 1900 address to the American Negro Academy in which he insisted the color line belts the world and . . . the social problem of the twentieth century is to be the relation of the civilized world to the dark races of mankind.¹² The global problem identified by Du Bois was made acute less than two decades later by the massive movements of racialized laborers during the First World War, and as the war ground on, millions of people on the other side of the global color line resisted this unprecedented imposition.¹³

For people living in Egypt at the time, the sight of young men being sent away from their villages to work abroad—often bound together by a thick rope—was reminiscent of nothing if not slavery. By the second half of the nineteenth century, most enslaved people in Egypt, especially if they were young men engaged in hard labor, were Black Africans (sudāni).¹⁴ Even after slavery was officially abolished in 1877, it persisted surreptitiously, along with a link between Blackness, African origins, and enslavement in Egyptian popular culture.¹⁵ So when urbane, educated Egyptians saw farmers from the countryside—whom they had come to perceive as the repository of Egyptian national authenticity¹⁶—in a condition akin to slavery, they understood how Egyptians had been racialized as people of colour during the war. I argue that the 1919 revolution should be seen partly as an attempt to articulate an alternative conception of Egyptian racial identity, which I call racial nationalism, in response.

FIGURE 0.2. Men of the Egyptian Labor Corps working on the docks of Boulogne, France, 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.

FIGURE 0.3. Two men driving an ambulance camel, al-Arish, 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.

FIGURE 0.4. Men of the Egyptian Labor Corps unloading coal in Beirut, 1918. Imperial War Museum, London.

FIGURE 0.5. A company of the Egyptian Labor Corps at Boulogne, France, 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.

TELLING THE STORY OF THE ELC

The sheer scale of the ELC recruitment effort, which enlisted approximately 4 percent of the population and indirectly affected many more, is remarkable.¹⁷ But even more astounding is the extent to which this story has largely been forgotten today. Partly, this can be explained by the deliberate suppression of source material. Heavy British censorship during the war prevented unbiased coverage of the ELC in the Egyptian press. For the English-speaking public, most writers and readers were simply not that interested in the stories of nonwhite men working behind the front lines when their Tommies from back home were wrapped in glory. One reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald called the ELC an army behind the army that’s fighting, which gets none of the limelight . . . none of the glory . . . and mighty little thanks for all the work they do.¹⁸ Ignorance by contemporary observers has carried over into popular memory, and even in the outpouring of podcasts, museum exhibits, documentaries, and events celebrating the centennial anniversary of the global First World War, the ELC has received scarcely a mention.¹⁹

In the past decade, historians have begun to take notice of the ELC. They have been documented in books about British military logistics and military labor.²⁰ Mario Ruiz wrote an article about their images being used in British propaganda efforts.²¹ Alia Mossallam has also written recent articles in Arabic and English about the experiences of ELC men working abroad and in the lead-up to the 1919 revolution.²² The Egyptian Labor Corps synthesizes these sources and many others in the first book-length study of the ELC from 1914 to 1919.

That the ELC is relatively unknown today also has to do with historiographic trends. Historians of modern Egypt have long seen the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as shaped by the competing forces of the British Empire on one hand and the emerging Egyptian nation-state on the other. Scholars focused on British imperialism have often explained Egypt’s entanglement with the empire as a function of its role as a producer of raw materials like cotton.²³ Studies of global capitalism and its relationship to imperialism and nationalism have loomed large in this body of literature, and the history of working people in Egypt has often been narrated as the development of a national working class.²⁴ But the important role of Egypt as a British military base, and the relationship between infrastructures of war and trade,²⁵ remains underappreciated. As a result, many historians of the British Empire in Egypt have bracketed the First World War as an exceptional time, implying that it cannot tell us much about the broad sweep of the occupation.²⁶

Meanwhile, for Egyptian nationalist historians like ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i, the war served primarily as a prelude to a more significant development: the 1919 revolution. This was the moment when Egyptians acted in unison to express the will of the people (faḍl al-sha‘ab).²⁷ According to the nationalist interpretation, the most important effect of the ELC was to help rural workers and farmers discover their true identity as Egyptians.²⁸ In this sense, the ELC is like what historian of colonial India Partha Chatterjee has called a fragment of the nation; their story has been told only insofar as it fits into the emergence of a homogenous national subject. According to Chatterjee, the task remains for historians to recover the singularity of such fragments, whose political imaginaries and solidarities cannot always be reduced to nationalism.²⁹

While the historical establishment alternatively ignored or glossed over the participants in the ELC, popular culture, including songs, novels, and films, carried on their memories. Sayyid Darwish’s anthem Salma ya Salama (Safe and Sound, 1918) brought the experiences of the ELC to the masses. Stories about the men in the genre of ḥuwādīt (sing., ḥadūta) were repeated throughout the countryside and sometimes provided family members with the only news they could get about their loved ones sent off to serve.³⁰ As the years passed by, novels like Naguib Mahfouz’s Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk, 1956) and films like Ahmad Badrakhan’s Sayyid Darwish (1966) depicted scenes of men being conscripted to the ELC during the First World War. In the 1990s, ‘Ismat Sayf al-Dawla’s Mudhakkirat Qarya (Memoirs of a Village, 1996) and Amin ‘Izz al-Din’s Al-Faylaq (The Corps, 1999) kept the memory of the ELC alive for a new generation.³¹ The gap between official memory and popular culture pops up again and again in this book. As chapter 6 will show, the men of the ELC filled the spaces around them with the sounds of music, theater, and chatter to help them endure the difficult circumstances of the war, and their memory has lived on through many of these same media.

The centennial anniversary of the First World War saw a sudden upsurge in public commemorations of the ELC in Egypt. From 2013 to 2017, there were a number of official events celebrating Egypt’s contributions to the First World War, most of which included some mention of the ELC.³² Ashraf Sabry—a man from Alexandria who had fashioned himself into something of a historical researcher—often told his version of the laborers’ stories on television during this period. In March 2016 he spoke over a series of pictures and film clips of the ELC on the Egyptian network ONTV:

These were our people. . . . In just two weeks, they could not have come out as soldiers like this, unless under the skin of every one of us is a true Egyptian soldier (taḥt al-gald kull wāḥid minnina maṣri gundi fi‘lan). From the days of the Pharaohs, we have inherited this military spirit (min ayyām al-farā‘ina iḥna natawaraṣ hadhi al-gundiyya).³³

Sabry’s attachment to a militaristic brand of Egyptian nationalism was apparent, but his characterization of the ELC as representing the contributions of the Egyptian army to the First World War does not line up with the historical record. The Anglo-Egyptian army of the time was only deployed in Darfur, while the ELC was a separate organization sent across Europe and the Middle East, never explicitly involved in fighting. Unlike the tirailleurs algériens recruited by the French, for example, Egyptians were not outfitted with weapons in the major theaters of the war.³⁴ It is surprising, then, to hear ELC laborers being referred to as soldiers from the Egyptian army, and historian Khaled Fahmy has already pushed back against some of Sabry’s claims on Egyptian television.³⁵

Sabry’s take on the ELC served a clear political purpose as he spoke in March 2016. As Fahmy has argued, after a new military government came to power in the wake of the 2011–2013 uprising known popularly as the Arab Spring, supporters of the Egyptian army became interested in crafting a narrative that decisively entwined the army with the nation.³⁶ In providing the ELC as proof of a military spirit that exists under the skin of every one of us . . . since the days of the Pharaohs, Sabry established this connection by deploying an understanding of Egyptian collective identity that scholars refer to as Pharaonism.³⁷ Sabry drew on this long-standing conception of what makes Egyptians unique by representing the ELC as one link in a chain of military service connecting people in Egypt today with those living millennia ago.

RACIAL NATIONALISM AND THE SPATIAL TURN

Chapter 8 of this book suggests a historical relationship between the ELC and Pharaonism that goes deeper than the mere coincidence of both in Sabry’s rhetoric. Pharaonism was an assertion of Egyptians’ unique essence, in contrast to the other groups with which they had been linked in the late imperial imaginary. Historians Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski have analyzed how what they called Pharaonicism juxtaposed Egyptian identity with the Ottoman/Islamic World on one hand and the Arab World on the other.³⁸ The First World War was important in this regard, with the ultimate dissolution of the Ottoman Empire foreclosing possibilities to identify with the Caliph, and with British backing of the Arab revolt casting doubt upon Arab nationalism. As Gershoni and Jankowski see it, Pharaonism in the 1920s and 1930s was an expression of territorial nationalism that provided an interlude between these two more geographically diffuse identifications.³⁹

However, by ignoring the ELC and the racialization of Egyptians as people of color during the war, Gershoni and Jankowski miss another important aspect of Pharaonism as an exclusionary logic: its assertion of Egyptian superiority and fitness to rule over Black Africans. Borrowing from constructivist theories of nationalism made popular by Anthony D. Smith, they argue that a group of intellectuals transformed objective elements existing outside human consciousness into nationalist ideology.⁴⁰ These include "territory, race, language, kinship, religion, history, and the like (emphasis mine). Such natural factors, they write, are only the raw material of nationalism; consciousness and will are the engines responsible for . . . transform[ing] these objective elements, giving them new meaning.⁴¹ According to Gershoni and Jankowski, the end result of this process is that race becomes ‘nation’—as if the two are mutually exclusive concepts, or the latter implies an epistemological break" from the former.⁴²

However, as this book will argue, the notion of a unique Egyptian race was also an ideology, and crucially, one that overlapped in many ways with nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time of the First World War, notions of Egyptian racial identity included a fluctuating constellation of concepts that developed in conversation with other forms of theoretically dividing humanity—including religion, class, gender, family, empire, and the nation. As chapter 8 will explore in greater detail, part of the reason why it has been difficult for historians to discern the influence of ideas about race on nationalism in Egypt has to do with the conceptually overloaded terms and the multiple synonyms used in the Arabic sources to express them. But perhaps a bigger factor involves the sociology of knowledge production in the Anglo-American world, where Toni Morrison has identified a norm against noticing race and its constitutive influence on the global order we inhabit today since the end of the Second World War.⁴³

Egyptian nationalist writers and intellectuals in the early twentieth century worked at the intersection of global scientific idioms and a Muslim tradition that employed organic metaphors for the social body (jism). Within these theoretical confines, they carved out space for a unique Egyptian identity in opposition to the other groups with which they had been linked in the late imperial imaginary. These included Muslims, Arabs, and also, especially during the war, people of colour. If we understand the race concept as a shifting category that assigns meaning to human physical features in order to fix individuals within social groups that reproduce biologically,⁴⁴ then it makes sense to think of Pharaonism’s assertion of a biological link of descent between ancient and modern Egyptians as a type of racial nationalism.

I use the term racial nationalism to refer to any nationalist discourse asserting that biological concepts are necessary ingredients shaping national identity. Racial nationalists portray the nation as a living organism, imagine relations between national subgroups as symbiotic, and measure national belonging and purity in terms of descent and parentage. In central and southeastern Europe between 1900 and 1940, the peasantry was considered the pure racial repository of the nation, and racial nationalism was joined to the science of eugenics.⁴⁵ In colonial Tanganyika and Tanzania during the 1930s and 1940s, racial nationalism built on long-standing discourses of civilization (ustaarabu, to become like the Arabs) and played on the semantic slippage between race and nation in the Kiswahili word taifa to assert an African identity valorizing patrilineal descent from the African continent.⁴⁶ Following Marwa Elshakry and Elise K. Burton, I argue that the Arabic word umma came to denote a similar conceptual slippage between race and nation in Egypt, blunting the secularizing force of European scientific racism and eugenics discourses and making it harder for historians today to appreciate the influence of these discourses on nationalist thought.⁴⁷

Examples of the race concept can be traced far back in history in many contexts,⁴⁸ but the global discourse of white supremacy—which hierarchically ordered all the people of the world and put white people on top—took shape during the nineteenth century. As Ivan Hannaford has shown, disaggregation of mankind into basic groups like East and West was the first stage in the development of the idea of race in Europe.⁴⁹ In the field of Middle East Studies, the East/West distinction has been most famously critiqued by Edward Said, who attacked the attempts of academic Orientalists to create an ontological and epistemological distinction between Western selves and Eastern Others in their scholarship.⁵⁰ But the period from 1870 to 1914 was the high point of the idea of race.⁵¹ By this time, earlier, textually based attempts by Orientalists to trace the outlines of distinct