ABSTRACT
The political-academic debate on nationalism remains a pendulum swinging between two extremes: the one referring to nationalism as an essentially 'imagined community', and the other contending that it expresses the most prominent '-ism'. The wave of Egyptian exclusive nationalism reached its height just after the revolution of 1919. The recurrent debate on Egypt's identity is a 'compositional struggle', between proponents of different components of that identity. It is clear that interpretations within the Egyptian political elite of Egypt's identity are divergent. The final end of the older generation came with the March crisis of 1954 when it disintegrated in its fratricidal strife over power and ideology. As for the Islamists, those who once had hated Saddam Hussein for his persecution of the Islamic trend and his Ba'thist pan-Arabism, found themselves closer to him than to their former conservative allies and sponsors in the Gulf.
