Pharaonism is an ideology that rose to prominence in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. A version of Egyptian nationalism, it argued for the existence of an Egyptian national continuity from ancient history to the modern era, stressing the role of ancient Egypt and incorporating anti-colonial sentiment. Pharaonism's most notable advocate was Taha Hussein.
Egyptian identity Egyptian identity since the Bronze Age Egyptian Empire evolved for the longest period under the influence of native Egyptian culture, religion, and identity (see Ancient Egypt). The Egyptians subsequently came under the influence of a succession of foreign rulers, including the Persians, the Greco-Macedonians, the Romans, and the Arab Caliphates. Under these foreign rulers, the Egyptians accommodated three new religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and produced a new language, Egyptian Arabic. By the 4th century, the majority of the Egyptians had converted to Christianity, and in 535 the Roman Emperor Justinian ordered the Temple of Isis at Philae closed, which marked the formal end of the ancient religion of Egypt.
During the Middle Ages, the monuments of the ancient Egyptian civilization were destroyed as remnants of a time of jahiliyyah ("pre-Islamic ignorance"). The majority of the destruction of the ruins occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries, a time of floods, famines, and plagues in Egypt, leading some people to believe that Allah was punishing the Egyptians for the continued existence of these relics of a time of jahiliyyah. The most notable acts of destruction in the Middle Ages were the tearing down of a statue of the goddess Isis in 1311 in Fustat and the destruction of a temple in Memphis in 1350, which inspired much relief when it was discovered the "evil eye" (the eye of Horus) on the temple's walls did not cause the deaths of those destroying the temple as feared.
The Quran singled out the Pharaoh whose story is related in the Book of Exodus as an especially vicious tyrant opposed to Allah, and in general the Pharaohs are portrayed in Islamic tradition as depraved despots reveling in jahiliyyah. Several Muslim leaders such as the Caliph Yazid III ordered the destruction of all the pharaonic monuments. However, there is considerable evidence of popular local pride in monuments such as the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, so much so that these monuments were never destroyed out of fear of causing riots. The monuments of Pharaonic Egypt were generally seen as possessing magical powers and were viewed as objects of respect by ordinary Egyptians, despite the fact that the Quran execrates ancient Egyptian beliefs (such as polytheism and the worship of Pharaohs) as an especially reprehensible period of jahiliyyah. As late as 1378, it was reported that nominally Muslim peasants would go burn incense at night in front of the Sphinx while uttering prayers which were said to empower the Sphinx to speak, which led a Sufi holy man to attack the Sphinx. Local legends claimed the attack on the Sphinx led to a massive sand storm at Giza, which only ended with the holy man's lynching. The belief in the magical powers of the Pyramids and other ancient ruins helped to preserve them, as some Egyptians warned of dire consequences should they be destroyed and concluded that the monuments were best left untouched. Such beliefs reflected a degree of pride in Egypt's ancient past. In the Middle Ages, Egyptians also created a story that assigned the Pharaoh in the religious texts a foreign, Persian origin, a way of salvaging pride despite the Quran's condemnation of him. To protect the ruins, they frequently attributed them to Islamic figures, recasting them as quasi-Islamic sites shielded from destruction.
Because knowledge of the hieroglyphs was lost from the 6th century until 1822 when Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the memory of ancient Egypt was that of an impressive civilization which built various monuments whose precise meaning had long since been lost, limiting the extent of popular identification with it. Mohammad Ali the Great, the Albanian tobacco merchant turned Ottoman vali (governor) of Egypt and who ruled the country with an iron hand from 1805 until his death in 1849, had no interest in the ruins of ancient Egypt except as a source of gifts for foreign leaders. Likewise, Mohammad Ali had a permissive attitude towards Europeans taking ancient Egyptian relics with them, allowing much plundering of various sites, such as by the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni while a diplomatic posting in Cairo was highly sought after owing to opportunities for looting. One of Mohammad Ali's officials, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, persuaded him in 1836 to embark on preserving Egypt's heritage by ending the plundering of sites in Egypt and to create a museum to display Egypt's treasures instead of letting them be taken to Europe. Tahtawi later published a history of ancient Egypt in 1868, which took advantage of the discoveries of archaeologists and the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, marking the first time that the heritage of ancient Egypt was used as a symbol of national pride in modern Egypt.
Nationalism Questions of identity came to the fore in the 20th century as Egyptians sought to end the British occupation of Egypt, leading to the rise of ethno-territorial secular Egyptian nationalism (also known as "Pharaonism"). Pharaonism became the dominant mode of expression by Egyptian anti-colonial activists of the pre- and inter-war periods, according to modern historian and University of Colorado professor James P. Jankowski;
Pharaonism celebrated Egypt as a distinct geographic and political unit whose origins went back to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3100 BC, and which presented Egypt as more closely linked to Europe rather than to the Middle East. The focus on the ancient Egyptian past was used as a symbol of Egyptian distinctiveness, which was used to down-play Arab and Islamic identities, and was intended to brand Egypt as a European rather than a Near Eastern nation. Pharaonism first appeared in the early 20th century in the writings of Mustafa Kamil Pasha who called Egypt the world's first state and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed who wrote about a "pharaonic core" surviving in modern Egypt.
In 1931, following a visit to Egypt, Syrian Arab nationalist Sati' al-Husri remarked that: Quoted in The later 1930s would become a formative period for Arab nationalism in Egypt, in large part due to efforts by Syrian/Palestinian/Lebanese intellectuals. Nevertheless, a year after the establishment of the League of Arab States in 1945, to be headquartered in Cairo, Oxford University historian H. S. Deighton was still writing:
One of the most prominent Egyptian nationalists and critics of pan-Arabism was Egypt's most notable writer of the 20th century, Taha Hussein. He expressed his disagreement with Arab unity and his beliefs in Egyptian nationalism on multiple occasions. In one of his most well-known articles, written in 1933 in the magazine Kawkab el Sharq, he wrote:
It has been argued that until the 1940s, Egypt was more in favour of territorial, Egyptian nationalism and distant from the pan-Arab ideology. Egyptians generally did not identify themselves as Arabs, and it is revealing that when the Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul met the Arab delegates at Versailles in 1918, he insisted that their struggles for statehood were not connected, claiming that the problem of Egypt was an Egyptian problem and not an Arab one.Makropoulou, Ifigenia. Pan-Arabism: What Destroyed the Ideology of Arab Nationalism? . Hellenic Center for European Studies. January 15, 2007.
In February 1924 Zaghloul, now prime minister of Egypt, had all of the treasures found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun seized from the British archaeological team led by Howard Carter under the grounds that the treasures belonged to Egypt and to prevent Carter from taking them to Britain as he wanted. Zaghloul justified the seizure under the grounds that "it is the duty of the government to defend the rights and dignity of the nation". On 6 March 1924, Zaghlul formally opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun to the Egyptian public in an elaborate ceremony held at night with the sky lit up by floodlights, which reportedly attracted the largest crowd ever seen in Luxor. The opening of Tutankhamun's tomb was turned into a nationalist demonstration when the British High Commissioner, Field Marshal Allenby arrived, and was loudly booed by the crowd, who started to demand immediate British evacuation of Egypt. The long dead Tutankhamun was turned by the Wafd Party into a symbol of Egyptian nationalism, which was why Carter's plans to take the treasures from his tomb aroused such opposition in Egypt. However, the case of Tutankhamun's treasures were merely an opportunistic move by Zaghlul at asserting Egyptian independence, which had only been gained in February 1922, against Carter and his team, who were viewed as acting arrogantly towards the Egyptians.
Ahmed Hussein who founded the nationalistic and fascistic Young Egypt Society in 1933 stated that he became interested in Egyptian nationalism after a scouting trip through the Valley of the Kings in 1928, which inspired him with the belief that if Egypt was great once, then it could be great again. The Young Egypt Society glorified the ancient Egyptian past, which was regularly mentioned in party rallies, and in reference to Egypt's Turco-Circassian aristocracy demanded that Egypt have "a leader of action, who is not of Turkish or Circassian blood, but of Pharaonic blood". Initially, the Young Egypt Society had a very particularist interpretation of Egyptian nationalism, which emphasized that Egypt was not just another Muslim and/or Arab nation, but rather having a very distinctive identity owing to the heritage of ancient Egypt. The Young Egypt Society, which was closely modeled along the lines of the fascist movements of Italy and Germany, called for a British withdrawal from Egypt, the union of Egypt and the Sudan, and for Egypt under the banner of Arab nationalism to create an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans. The invocation of the glories of ancient Egypt by the Young Egypt Society was used to explain why the Egyptians were to dominate the proposed pan-Arab state. However, Hussein discovered that Pharaonism appealed only to middle class Egyptians, and limited his party's appeal to the Egyptian masses. Starting in 1940, the Young Egypt Society abandoned Pharaonism and sought to reinvent itself as an Islamic fundamentalist party.
"Pharaonism" was condemned by Hassan al-Banna, the founder and Supreme Guide of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, as glorifying a period of jahiliyyah, which is the Islamic term for the pre-Islamic past. In a 1937 article, Banna attacked Pharaonism for glorifying the "pagan reactionary Pharaohs" like Akhenaten, Ramesses the Great and Tutankhamun instead of Muhammad and his companions and for seeking to "annihilate" Egypt's Muslim identity. Banna insisted that Egypt could only be part of the wider Islamic ummah ("community") and that any effort to mark Egyptian distinctiveness from the rest of Islamic world was going against the will of Allah.
Arab identity