Negotiating Egyptian nationalism: Militant Islamist confrontations with the state and the fragmentation of political authority
Date
2010
Authors
Musekamp, Catherine
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Publisher
Illumine
Abstract
Since Egypt’s 1952 Free Officer coup d’état, Egypt has been governed by authoritarian regimes and nationalism has served as the central ideological basis for political authority. This paper explores the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, when militant Islamist opposition toward the Sadat and Mubarak regimes was one of the most significant threats to state security and one of the biggest challenges to the ruling regimes’ hegemony over political authority. This paper argues that the negotiation of national identity was crucial to the Egyptian state’s confrontation with militant Islamist groups during the late Sadat presidency and the Mubarak era to the 1990s; however, the state’s endorsement of an “Islamized” Egyptian nationalism was co-opted by various state institutions and competing political groups, leading to a fragmentation of political authority.
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Citation
Musekamp, C. (2010). Negotiating Egyptian nationalism: Militant Islamist confrontations with the state and the fragmentation of political authority. Illumine, 9(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.18357/illumine9120107776