Inferences About the Egyptian Nation While Deconstructing the Arab-Western Opposition

Abstract

As understandings of democracy emanate from people who frequently identify themselves as members of a nation group, the aim of the article is with the example of Egypt to demonstrate how the liberal understanding of nationhood has changed in the diverse, pluralist and dynamic Arab, Islamic, and Muslim contexts against the background of general geostrategic positioning in the contemporary World.

The first part of the article compares some aspects of Western thought with Islamic thought. The second part of the article demonstrates relations between the categories: Arab, Muslim, Islamic, and their relation with understandings of liberalism and democracy. The third part of the article demonstrates different cultural and political epochs in Egyptian history. About methodology it can be said that the author has discursively presented narrations and for the first time uses journalism and new media sources for constructing Arab Spring 2011, included the Egyptian revolution, as being here constrained by the limited research tools available.

The main conclusions are: there are strong trends toward nationalism in Egypt that may influence the Arab, Islamic, and Muslim worlds taken into account that Egypt is the most populous Arab State and Egypt's influence in Arab and Islamic media space.

Although the paper does not treat all the referred aspects coherently, the author hopes that she could raise at least some problems for further research and inter alia challenge the presumption that the cause of Arab-Israeli conflict and Arab Spring 2011 has been bad internal governance.

Keywords: Arab, Islam, Muslim, Egypt

JEL Classification: B30