This week I went to see Najla Said perform her one-woman show, “Palestine.†Najla’s father was the famous scholar Edward Said, who was born to a Palestinian-American father and a half-Palestinian, half-Lebanese mother. Her mother is Lebanese. Both are Christians. Najla was born and raised in New York and fit in better with her Jewish peers than with anyone else. Najla’s play is largely about identity and hers, unsurprisingly, is somewhat confused. Born in New York to a Coptic Egyptian father and Dutch mother, I can relate. For years Najla ignored her roots and slid comfortably into the customs of her Jewish schoolmates, which may seem unfathomable to those living in the Middle East, but in the melting pot that is the United States—and particularly in New York—it is surprisingly easy to do. It was only after the attacks of September 11th that her identity as an Arab came into sharp focus for her. The issue of Arab identity is one that I have wrestled with myself-although in different ways and for different reasons. I had first begun thinking about issues of identity years before September 11, when I was a sophomore in college and African-American students would tell me that, as an Egyptian, I was ignoring my heritage by not identifying as African. I just didn’t. Yes, Egypt is on the continent of Africa, but no one in my family considered themselves African. So what was I? I knew I was Egyptian, and Coptic, but what did that mean? Was I an Arab? I’d never discussed identity with my family in Egypt. One of my relatives in the United States said no, explaining that the Copts’ presence in Egypt predates the 639 Islamic Invasion by centuries at least. And yet, other Copts I’d spoken to in the United States said they did consider themselves Arabs because their native tongue was Arabic. Truth be told, it didn’t make much difference to me—not, that is, until September 11. I still didn’t really consider myself an Arab—after all, I don’t even speak Arabic—but when I saw how badly Muslims and Middle Easterners were being treated in the United States, I often felt I had to present myself as an Arab just to challenge the stereotypes that were so widely held. The question of Arab identity for Egyptians of any religion is a fascinating one, though. The best exploration of it that I have read to date was in Leila Ahmed’s fantastic book, A Border Passage. Ahmed grew up in Heliopolis in the 1940s, and in her book writes about the identity shift in which her fellow citizens went from being Egyptians to being Arabs. In her telling, Arabism was begun in late-19th Century Syria, largely as a political construct designed to mobilize Syrians of all religions into rebelling against the Ottoman Empire. At that time, Ahmed writes, Egyptians were bothered by the British, not the Ottomans, and weren’t interested in an Arab identity. Egyptians were so removed from the notion that when an Egyptian asked permission to speak at a 1913 conference of Arabs in being held in Paris, he was denied on the grounds that only Arabs were allowed to take the floor. During World War I, Ahmed continues, the idea reemerged, this time in the form of a British-instigated revolt against the Ottomans that was led by T.E. Lawrence. Once again, the Egyptians had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t until the 1930s and the rise of anti-Zionism in Egypt, coupled with sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and the Muslim Brotherhood’s assertions that Egypt’s essential identity was Islam, that the notion of Arabness really began to catch on in Egypt, a notion that excluded non-Muslims. And that, presumably, was when the seeds of today’s sectarian violence were sown. I am greatly simplifying Ahmed’s exploration, of course, but it was for me both fascinating and elucidating. It helped me understand why for so long I had been unable to get a uniform answer on the issue, and was reassuring to me that even a Muslim woman who had grown up in Cairo found it somewhat bewildering. It also helped me realize that the issue of identity is changeable, not only for people like Najla and me who bear many identities simultaneously, but indeed for the country of Egypt at large. Egypt was once filled with Egyptians, then there were Arabs and non-Arabs. Today, it seems, there are Muslims, and non-Muslims, i.e. Christians, i.e. Copts, and tensions between them are escalating. It’s a volatile situation, one that, if left unchecked, could have serious consequences, not only for Copts but for all those who support a modern, moderate and more democratic Egypt. BM
