Nariman El-Mofty AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Edward Said dedicated his career to the theorising of Orientalism and to proving a point: the grouping of everyone non-European into the devalued category of the ‘orient’ was simultaneously a cause and an effect of European aspirations to develop themselves as sole representatives of humanity.
The question that arises is, when did the “orient” become convinced by such a euro-centric conceptualization of humanity? Why did they identify themselves as an extension of the European “human”, who were they supposed to juxtapose themselves against, given that the very construction of the European identity they were imitating was created on the basis of being the “orient’s” antithesis?
In the first article of this series, I shone the light on a potential answer in the form of the valuable work of Galal Amin “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians”, which also inspired the title of this series. Although he did not make this argument explicitly, his excavation of the changes in the Egyptian middle-class’ standards and aspirations demonstrated the persistence of an image of a classical imperialist aristocracy that was inspired by European bourgeois conceptions.
