A mother, a sister, a wife—but never, in the minds of her people, a daughter.
Egypt has always signified maturity: in what she has experienced, what she has lived, what she has internalized.
Egypt birthed her civilization, laying the ground for agriculture and infusing the air of the Delta and the valley with stability, a land that sustains and provides.
Over time, agriculture gave rise to other fields of knowledge, including chemistry and mathematics. Temples towering over the land became demonstrations of that knowledge, sanctums venerating what the land, the sacred mother, had inspired.
The arc of human progress moved on.
Egypt’s civilization showed signs of age, yet the grand lady of ancient history stood her ground, and the world came to her.
Greeks, Persians, Romans—philosophers and generals, scientists and artists—sought her.
Many arrived at her shores full of triumphal pride, but the wise among them soon discerned in her a wealth and beauty that made them kneel before her grandeur, before all that Egypt entailed and represented.
The triumphant Commanders wore the crowns of the pharaohs not in strident conquest but in warm requests for belonging. For them, as for her own people, Egypt became mother, sister, wife: sustaining, giving, inspiring, balancing.
Geographically, Egypt’s world was always condensed.
For millennia, Egyptians have lived on the Nile Delta and the valley’s narrow, fertile stretch in the Sa'eed (Upper Egypt).
They looked at the deserts around them not as domains to be explored but as borders separating their sacred land from the world beyond. Six thousand years of history unfolded on that small strip of earth. For some, the land was small, and so the peasants lived small lives.
But in the realms of the mind, in the expansive reaches of Egyptian consciousness, Egypt’s world was vast, as layers of human quest for knowledge accumulated on this land. Often detached from the daily lives of the people, these attainments—this knowledge— had materialized in Egypt and seeped into the making of Egyptianness.
Smallness was never part of Egypt.
Egypt was Isis, appearing suppressed and docile for long periods, yet at her core defiant and determined. Isis challenged her enemies within and without, roaming her lands and those of neighbours in search of her husband, her sacred masculine, to resuscitate life from death.
Her fertility, her giving, her pleasure and her warmth conjured new meaning in Horus: her son, the manifestation of her steely will, defender of her realm and guide of her people.
Egyptians knew their land was special.
Ancient mythology internalized Egypt as a reflection of the heavens. In their consciousness, what was above in the abode of the gods was also below in the land they inhabited. This land was not theirs in the sense of possession, but in the sense of belonging.
The land did not just sustain life; Egypt enriched her consciousness.
As Isis had birthed life, forming a sacred trinity at the core of Egyptian thought, so Hathor, goddess of beauty, widened that consciousness.
Hathor infused life with warmth and contentment. From stability in the rich valley came serenity and peace, and, lurking always in Egyptianness, a thirst for life, often suppressed yet never far from the surface.
The Egyptian “she” found other manifestations over the centuries.
There was Baheya, the embodiment of Nile Delta culture, the accumulation of traditions, values and ways of living that, for centuries, defined Egyptianness.
Baheya was the serenity and solidity of scattered villages, the harmony of churches, mosques and monasteries dotting the valley. She was the confident peasant Mahmoud Mokhtar sculpted beside the sphinx in his colossal 1920s work Egypt Awakened.
There was Maria, who represented Egypt’s exposure to Europe and the West in the early 20th century, and the seepage of Mediterraneanism into Egyptian consciousness.
Maria was vivacious, hair flying in the wind, defying oppression, embracing life and love, coaxing Baheya to walk with her on the shores of Alexandria.
Some, even at the height of Egypt’s liberal experiment in the early twentieth century, doubted whether she was truly Egyptian. Was she Greek? Italian? Maltese? Jewish? She looked north across the Mediterranean too often, they said.
Yet she was Egyptian to the core. In her speech and her walk, in her reading and dancing, Maria embodied the cosmopolitan openness that Cairo and Alexandria once epitomized for the whole Mediterranean basin.
There was “Nourai”, whose family had come from another north, some said the Levant, others, Turkey.
Egypt’s premier dramatist of the 20th century, Osama Anwar Okasha, conjured her in his last masterpiece El-Masraweya (The Egyptians) to embody an Ottoman strand of Egyptian consciousness, at a time when Egyptianness was perfecting, without tension or struggle, the art of weaving its soul into a whole that transcended its components.
The weaving proved momentary.
Egypt’s liberal experiment collapsed, undermined by attack and its own rot.
Maria left, either by compulsion or choice, and disappeared. Yet much of what she had contributed to Egyptianness remained.
Maria did not just live in Egypt for decades; she became Egyptian. Her departure tore at her own emotions, as many stories of the diaspora reveal, but it also tore into the Egyptian psyche.
Nourai too withdrew. The links she had forged between Egyptianness and the Levant, between Egyptianness and Ottomanism, grew tenuous.
Like Maria’s legacy, her imprint sank into the collective psyche, veiled for most, yet still close to the surface for those who look closely at the enigma of Egypt, the wonder of Egyptianness.
Baheya never leaves.
She roams the land; she owns the land. In her enriched self, in the echoes of history she carries, in her remembering of Maria and Nourai, Baheya enshrines Egyptianness and represents Egypt.
* The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
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