ABSTRACT
Stabilizing the relationship between religion and politics in Egypt would require consensus about the place of Islam in Egyptian identity. Islam has been an aspect of Egyptian identity since the Arab conquest of the seventh century, but it has never been the only binding force in the society. The focus on Islam proposed by Afghani and reinvoked by the Muslim Brotherhood in the interwar period served the purposes of political elites seeking the liberation of Egypt and the rest of the Arab world from European domination. The meaning of Islamic identity and the needs of the state change with every iteration of religious-political conflict. For Muhammad Ali, Islam meant dependence on the Ottomans and dependence on an entrenched, indigenous elite out of touch with what he believed were new global imperatives. The Ottoman Empire identified with Islam from its modest beginnings on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire in about 1300.
