Commemorating the Nation is a study of the relationship between public
commemoration and national identity in Egypt over the course of the
twentieth century. Appropriating insights from recent theoretical
discussions of collective memory and public commemoration, it examines
the modes by which different Egyptian communities of memory; the state
under successive regimes; rival political forces and movements; and
elite and non-elite groups within civil society remembered and
commemorated the Egyptian national struggle, its defining moments and
heroic figures, in specific sites of national memory. The book's
analysis ranges across the twentieth century, tracing the changing place
of selected sites of national memory from the pre-World-War-I years
through the decades of the parliamentary monarchy to the era of the
Egyptian Republic. Each of its three main sections is devoted to a
different form of commemoration. The first is the nationalist art of
Egypt's "national sculptor" Mahmud Mukhtar (1891-1934) and how his
monumental icons expressing the nationalist ethos, specifically his
sculpture Nahdat Misr and his statues of the leader of the 1919
Revolution, Sad Zaghlul, have been represented and re-represented by
successive generations of Egyptians. The second section analyzes the
modalities through which the historic figures of Egypt's Nationalist
Party, Mustafa Kamil (1874-1908) and Muhammad Farid (1868-1919), have
been preserved and commemorated through the remainder of the twentieth
century. The third section considers national holiday celebrations as
sites of Egyptian collective memory, particularly the celebration of the
July 1952 Revolution during the reign of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the
commemoration of the 1973 Crossing of the Suez Canal under his successor
Anwar al-Sadat. The book is the product of fieldwork in Egypt as well as
of extensive research in Egyptian publications. By analyzing nationalism
through the prism of public commemoration, the work extends our
understanding of the shaping of national identity and the evolution of
national imagining in modern Egypt. Although it focuses on Egypt, its
findings have implications for the study of collective memory and public
commemoration in general.
