"Strangers in Their Own Land"? Sectarianism, Secularism, and Racialization in 1900s Egypt

In 1911, Egyptian Christian nationalist Akhnukh Fanous made his plea for British-backed protections for Egypt’s Christians during the First Coptic Conference. Specifically, Fanous and other Coptic laity wanted quotas guaranteeing political representation and public funds allocated to Christian religious institutions – as they were for Islamic institutions. Christian nationalists cast themselves as “true” Egyptians whose presence in the country predated the seventh-century Arab Islamic conquests. British colonial officials, who had formally occupied Egypt since 1882, considered offering formal protections to Egypt’s Christians but did not want to antagonize the population, especially after the assassination of Christian Prime Minister Boutros Ghali in 1910. The question of Christian nationalism was fraught.

Fanous’ controversial demands are well-known to scholars of Egypt. Less appreciated, however, is how the sectarian discourses during this era were informed by numbers. In this paper, I argue that the early production of “minority” discourse in Egypt was, in part, an unintentional by-product of the British-organized census of 1907. The process of counting, mapping, and categorizing the Egyptian population according to a colonial frame unleashed sectarian anxieties by rendering a small but ascendant “minority” visible in new ways. While some Coptic nationalists felt compelled to respond to what they perceived to be their quantifiable marginalization in Egyptian society, Islamists responded by decrying the growing number of Christians since the British occupation. Meanwhile, British-backed Protestants used it to support their own demands for representation. By focusing on this British census and providing a history of colonial taxonomies that stretched to India, this paper shows how minoritization and Christian nationalism as a discourse was inspired by the British through a transnational network of colonial knowledge and expertise.