Introduction

Muhammad Farid was born in Cairo in 1878 as the scion of a distinguished Ottoman-Egyptian elite family; he died in Berlin in 1919, as the leader in exile of the Egyptian Nationalist Party (al-Hizb al-Watani). His life journey from an Ottoman-Egyptian gentleman to one of the leading figures in Egypt's struggle for national independence is also the story of how the Ottoman-Egyptian elite dropped its Ottomanness in a successful bid to gain acceptance as full-fledged Egyptian. Although quite a number of scholars have been attracted to the transition ‘from Ottomanism to Arabism’ in the first decades of the twentieth century, few have looked into the fascinating sociocultural contest that took place among competing identities in the emerging post-Ottoman, colonial Middle East. Farid's political leadership has received a fair amount of attention in Egypt and outside, so there seems to be little that can be added here to that perspective. Hence, this chapter will attempt to offer an interpretation of the formative process that repositioned an entire social group – the Ottoman-Egyptian elite – vis-à- vis and within the Egyptian nation.

The almost intuitive methods to use in such an interpretative essay are the tools provided by sub-fields such as memory and identity studies. In a previous work, I have attempted both, first with regard to Ottoman Egypt, and then, more recently, with a focus on African diaspora communities in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean worlds. Here, however, I propose to examine the processes that will be reviewed in the following pages as a special case within Diaspora Studies. That is, we shall define the Ottoman-Egyptian elite, formed between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, as a diasporic community of Ottoman military-administrative officers and their families, who settled in Egypt. That community was transformed in the late nineteenth century first into Egyptian-Ottoman, and then to an Egyptian elite, which shed in the process the Ottoman sociocultural ingredients of its collective identity.

The core of the argument is that these processes ‘re-diasporised’ the ruling Ottoman-Egyptian elite and re-opened a kind of diasporic discursive space between their ‘host-home’ country, that is, Egypt, and the ‘old homeland’, that is, the Ottoman capital Istanbul, the empire's cultural and social epicentre, and its imperial governing elite.