None of the Egyptians battling over “identity” in Egypt have learned the lessons of history, both contemporary and ancient. They apparently have not come across or grasped that pithy adage of Newberry: Egypt is a parchment scroll: The Bible is written on top of Herodotus and the Quran on top of that, while beneath the ancient script is still legible. In September 2011, which is to say nine months after the January Revolution and three months before the first post-revolutionary parliamentary elections, the head of the Salafist Calling and the most important figure in the Nour Party, Yasser Borhami, asked me what advice I could offer him following a dialogue between a group of Salafists and a group of secularist intellectuals of which I was one. Without a moment's hesitation I said, “I suggest that for the next six months you stop reading Islamic jurisprudence and devote that time to reading Egyptian folklore.” “Why?” he asked in surprise. “Because folklore wins in the end.” Borhami did not follow my advice. Nor, of course, did the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who had imagined that Egyptians had voted for their Islamist project or their religious-ideological vision in which “identity” takes a central place. They were wrong, as I had pointed out at the time. And they paid dearly for their misperception, far more heavily than all others who have attempted to abbreviate Egypt's identity to a single facet: “pharaonic” as was the case with the grandson of Ahmed Lotfi Al-Sayed who formed a political party for that purpose before the January Revolution; or “Mediterranean” as envisioned by Taha Hussein and, long before him, the Khedive Ismail who dreamed of turning Cairo into a Paris on the Nile; or “Islamic” as advocated by the Islamic Awakening movement that began in the 1920s; or “Arab” as espoused by the Arab nationalist movement and, above all, the Nasserist movement. In all of these, there was an African component, at least by virtue of Egypt's geographic position that makes it the “gateway to the dark continent” — an issue that had not prevailed before the Pharaoh Mina, the unifier of northern and southern Egypt, when the Delta was part of Asia while Upper Egypt belonged to Africa. Religion also intersected with all these facets. Egypt was regarded by many as part of the Islamic world. Simultaneously, it has been pegged as a “Third World” country according to 20th century classifications, although such a categorisation is changeable because it is linked to economic, technological and military conditions and criteria. Perhaps all the foregoing facets were in the minds of the members of the Committee of 50 that was charged with drafting the country's new constitution in the wake of the 30 June Revolution. The first article of the 2014 constitution reads: “The Arab Republic of Egypt is a sovereign, united, indivisible state of which no part can be relinquished. It has a democratic republican system of government that is based on citizenship and rule of law. The Egyptian people are part of the Arab nation and seek to promote its integration and unity. Egypt is part of the Islamic world, belongs to the African continent, cherishes its Asian dimension, and contributes to building human civilisation.” The constitutional architects defined identity in terms of geographical, historical and cultural spheres of allegiance. In so doing, they did not stray from the familiar and prevalent approaches, perhaps in large measure because they also had to defer to the political and social pressures of the current moment. What they did not heed was the irrefutable truth that Egypt's identity resides in the fact that it is “Egypt”: the oldest and longest lasting state in human history; the country that sought God before the Abrahamic religions, that was home to seven prophets before the emergence of Islam, that lived for seven centuries as a Christian nation and in which Christians remained the majority of the populace until the Fatimid era (which is to say for more than two centuries after the Islamic conquest); the country that preserved a special status under all the Islamic caliphates, from the Umayyad through the Abbasid and Ottoman dynasties under which Egypt was semi-autonomous from Damascus, Baghdad and Istanbul and its appointed governors frequently encouraged overt or tacit rebellion against the central authorities in the Islamic capitals (among the most famous are Ahmed Ibn Toloun, Saleh Al-Din Al-Ayoubi, Al-Zaher Baybars and Mohamed Ali who, in fact, mustered an army that fought and nearly defeated the forces of the Ottoman Sultan). For all the foregoing reasons, Egypt has always been a discrete and complex entity that emerged in phases producing civilisational layers that accumulated one on top of the other. Therefore, to reduce or abbreviate its identity to one facet or shade is a futile endeavour. The Egyptian folk heritage that extends across all that time retains lasting and unshakable values, words and meanings, and rites and rituals. For example, the rituals that are performed today at the Sufi shrine of Abul-Hajaj Al-Uqsuri are the same as those performed at that site in Egypt's Christian era and, before that, at the Amon Temple in the Pharaonic era. The words, meanings and significances may have changed, but the symbols have survived. It has been said that Egypt gave Christianity and Islam their spirit. I believe that this is no exaggeration. When the January Revolution began, Tahrir Square expressed all those meanings. Many observers stood amazed at the civilisational genes that had suddenly kicked into action at a particular historical moment to spur the Egyptians into rising above decades-long sectarian, class and political tensions. However, after the first revolutionary wave succeeded in forcing Hosni Mubarak to step down, the identity conflict began. This is the underlying cause of the blood that has been shed and continues to be shed today, while the most immediate and blatant cause is the struggle over power, on the one hand, the fight to preserve the state, on the other, even if some believe that control over power is the shortest and surest route to defending identity as they interpret or imagine it. This said; the Egyptian case is not an exception. Identity conflicts in their various forms have always been the fiercest and bloodiest in history. People caught in “I” versus “him” or the “us” versus “them” dichotomies are always more vicious when in states of rivalry, adversity and war with those who differ in religion, ancestry, class and culture. Within these major social structures discriminators of various stripes lock horns over subsidiary divides based on tribe, faction, sect and dialect. Even the great empires could not resist utilising identity to advance their colonialist projects, developing out of identity entire ideologies that justified these projects and facilitated the mobilisation of support and resources. The majority of violent acts are attributable to blind bias in favour of identities or to identity views that harbour hatred and contempt for the other. However, what I would like to stress here is that while identity can produce latent or systematic violence, this by no means implies that identity should be abandoned. The very idea is both impossible and unacceptable. What is crucial, however, is for people to abandon blind fanaticism for their identities or traits, which only makes them pawns to other agendas. Instead, they should subscribe to the principles of multiple and intersecting identities and acceptance of “the other”. They should also acquire an outstanding ability to differentiate between tolerance and indifference. The first is essential in order to diffuse the latent violent energies in identities. The second is undesirable because those who are unable respect what they have are unable to respect what others have. As the saying goes: the person who has nothing has nothing to give. This brings us to the crucial question: What is identity? In its first and basic sense it is a person's psychological awareness of who he is. However, that simple concept soon expanded as it interacted with a range of social sciences to give rise to social identity, cultural identity, and ethnic identity. All of these terms imply a bracketing of the individual self with a particular social status, cultural heritage or ethnic group. From here we then moved beyond the individual to a larger framework and began to speak of group identity or the existence of a sense of collective identity shared by the members of a particular group. Identity, thus, is a multifaceted term. It relates to how people understand and perceive themselves and what is important in their lives in terms of certain concepts such as gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, class, sect, etc. As indicated above, there are to types of identity: personal identity and social identity. They are interconnected in many ways. Whereas the first kind centres around the ego as a manifestation of a sense of self as perceived by the individual mind, the second kind is the essence of a society's collective brilliance and intelligence derived from its psychological makeup, its history, its values and creeds, its perceptions and life experiences as shaped and defined, among other things, by the powers to absorb or exclude, to connect with the experiences of others and to interact with others in various ways and means. These two types of identity form the heart of cognitive and scientific interest in the question of identity. This applies in particular to cultural studies, which concentrates primarily on examining the contexts in which, through which and on the basis of which individuals and groups shape, express and defend their identities or their perceptions of themselves. The concept of identity implies a fixed and permanent quality inherent in the individual or group. While this might be theoretically acceptable, it is difficult to realise in reality. This is why some scholars have urged greater focus on the process of fusion rather than on the quest for an immutable that is impossible. In fact, the individual is made up of multiple identities. As Amartya Sen wrote: “In our day-to-day lives we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups. We belong to all of these groups. A person might be, without feeling the slightest contradiction, an American citizen of Caribbean origin, with an African ancestry, a Christian, a political liberal, a male, a vegetarian, a long distance runner, a historian, a teacher, a novelist, a supporter of feminist causes, a normal heterosexual, a theatre goer, an environmental activist, a tennis enthusiast, a jazz musician and a firm believer in intelligent life in outer space.” Such plurality in identities exists in every individual on the face of the earth. It is why people's lives and minds are spread across many intersecting varied and sometime diverse affiliations. It is also why two individuals in a single informal social network may share one or more affiliations but find themselves in opposing and even adversarial affiliations at other levels. Because of this complexity, some social and economic studies have tried to avoid or minimise the “identity” factor. One means is to simply ignore or skirt around the impact of any collective sense of identity on the behaviour and choices of human groups and to treat each individual as a discrete and complete whole, a kind of island unto himself. The second means is the reductive approach, which entails applying a monochromatic lens that filters out all but a single affiliation for an individual or group. In general, people do not accord the same importance or priority to their various identities. Some carry greater weight or are perceived to carry greater weight than others. Accordingly, the members of a particular group might be unanimous in attaching greater importance to a particular affiliation and they might have a strong sense that this affiliation sets them apart from others. That group might be as small as a family or as large as a tribe. It might define itself in terms of kinship, sect, profession, or language. To some, the concept might be vast enough to embrace the state or even an entire region. At that level, the group might assume any number of names or terms to express the collective identity. In this part of the world we have had, for example, the Oriental League, the Pan-Islamic League, Arab Nationalism, the Regional National Bond, the Arab World, the Arab Nation and other such terms and concepts that have sparked heated controversy from the latter half of the 19th century till today. Upon closer inspection of the contexts and circumstances surrounding violence related to identity conflicts we find that the cogency, force and influence of the ideas that justify violence vary in direct proportion to the extent to which the irate and disgruntled sense that they belong to a particular group. The sense grows and is augmented by words and symbols that cause the affiliates to become more conscious of their shared anger and, simultaneously, more aware of the size of their group or organisation and more certain of their ability to rise up in unison against those that they believe oppress or persecute them. With this phenomenon in mind, David Schwartz said, “revolutionary impulses succeed to the degree that there exists a sense of belonging to a group that sees itself as making history even if that is a figment of the imagination.” Identity conflicts have plagued mankind throughout its long history of animosity, violence and warfare, from the hostilities between warring clans and tribes through the clashes of nations, empires and civilisations. The “clash of civilisations” is only one of the most recent manifestations of identity being used to mobilise a battle against the other. The phenomenon is part of the human condition; there is no use in denying it. Returning to our particular condition, we can say that in the context of rising unemployment, the insistence of the old to impose a mandate over the young in a rigid paternalistic system and a broadening generation gap, and with the closure of political horizons under an authoritarian and repressive state, the spread of corruption and mounting social injustice, the prevalence of rigid and strict traditional and religious cultures, and the growing sense of injustice and degradation with respect to the outside world, Egyptian youth have become increasingly prone to violence, whether symbolically, verbally or physically. This condition cannot be remedied without remedying the underlying causes. The identity conflict that flared after the revolution only aggravated the situation. While the causes cited above have been behind the social violence, the political violence we see today is primarily the product of the identity conflict. Once suppressed under the Mubarak regime due to the brute force of his security apparatus, the conflict suddenly exploded with unprecedented force after his departure. Copts regarded the political advances of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists with mounting alarm. In demonstrations to protest the destruction and burning of churches by Salafists, some Coptic protestors shouted “From the north to south and east to west, we are the real owners of this land.” Meanwhile, hardly had Mubarak left than the Salafists, jihadists and Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya members hijacked the revolution's slogan, “The people want the fall of the regime,” and inverted it to the chant, “The people want the application of Islamic Law.” I should add here that during the initial wave of the revolution I saw a group of bearded men parading around Tahrir Square carrying a huge Egyptian flag and chanting, “Sharqiya and Gharbiya (provinces) are one. Our demand is freedom.” In effect, this was a form of deception or disguise. Mubarak was still fighting to stay in power and he still had some ability to intimidate radical Islamists. Therefore, the Islamists opted for the ruse of cloaking themselves in patriotic revolutionary symbols and jargon. Then, after the regime fell and the source of fear was dispelled, they turned against the revolution, revealed their true face and expressed their original intent with the slogan, “Sharqiya and Gharabiya are one. Our demand is Islamic Law.” The identity conflict reached one of its most flagrant levels with the referendum on the constitutional amendments that was held on 19 March 2011. This marked the beginning of the divide in the revolutionary camp or the revolutionaries that spearheaded it and those that hopped on board once it seemed sure to succeed. Suddenly, Egypt was rift into “civil” forces — or “secularists” as the Muslim Brothers and Salafists called them, as their emirs, sheikhs and ideological propagandists, with no regard for truth or ethics, distorted the term to produce ideas and connotations that have nothing to do with its real meaning — and “Islamists” as they dubbed themselves despite the fact that their words and deeds often are as remote from the true spirit and message of Islam as can possibly be. Amidst all that din, some began to air their fear that Egyptian identity was being hijacked. By Egyptian identity, here, they were referring to certain long-ingrained qualities in the Egyptian character and culture, most notably the moderation or lack of fanaticism in their understanding and practice of their faith, a quality that had led Imam Al-Shafei to issue a different fatwa in Egypt than he would in Iraq on the same matter. Their anxieties increased as the Muslim Brotherhood drew closer to the more staunchly conservative takfiri Salafists and jihadists. This had come as a surprise to many after decades in which the Muslim Brothers seemed to have identified with the core features of Egyptian identity or acclimatised to the Egyptian cultural and social values and legacy, a factor that had given them a great advantage over the groups and movements that espouse violence and intolerance in the name of an ideology that parades beneath an Islamic banner. With the fall of Muslim Brotherhood rule after the 30 June Revolution, the conflict over power intensified. Again it adopted the facade of an identity cause. But those who spewed identity rhetoric from the podium of Rabaa Al-Adawiya knew full well that their design was to hold on to power and to prepare to kill in the defence of the banner of “legitimacy”, which they had lost long before the revolution for many reasons. Obviously, the purpose of all that identity rhetoric was to rally all the religious forces behind the Muslim Brothers in their purely political battle. As for their opponents, they adopted an identity rhetoric of a different sort. This one promoted the defence of the “specificity” of the Egyptian nation, people and history. The rival calls and claims continue to echo as vehemently as ever. I doubt they will stop any time soon. Everyone will persist with consummate naivety in that fight to define Egypt's identity. But ultimately they will have to follow the lead of that man who, after a long period of thought, defined water as water. The writer is a political analyst.
