Civic constitutional nationalism in Egypt

This chapter suggests that the period between 1907 and 1952 should be referred to as the era of civic constitutional nationalism in Egypt’s history. During the major anti-colonial nationalist revolution of 1919 this particular concept of Egyptian nationalism became the ideology and the operational agenda of the new major political forces in Egypt, which drafted the constitution of 1923 and shaped the parliamentary government in the following decades. This chapter analyzes the formation and transmission of this civic nationalism as well as the processes of reception by which ruling elites, civil society of the urban middle class effendiyya, and other broader sectors of literate and illiterate society transformed it into a collective identity.