Egyptian Historian Maged Farag: Egypt Should Drop The "Palestinian" Cause

A remarkable appearance, showing an Egyptian of note expressing, with complete lucidity, the reasons why Egypt has lost so much in joining in the pan-Muslim (and pan-Arab) cause of the “Palestinians,” over the past 70 years, and why it now has everything to gain from closer and friendly relations with Israel.

Maged Farag, Al-Sisi, and others like them share the view first expressed in the 1920s by Taha Husain, the celebrated Egyptian scholar, who insisted that only through emphasizing Egypt itself, Egyptian identity, Egyptian history, including its pre-Islamic and non-Islamic aspects  — could Egypt save itself from the distempers of the world of Arab (and other) Islam. He called this “Pharaonism.” And it was clearly an allternative to both the Islam of the Ikhwan and Hasan Al-Banna (and Mohamed Morsi), and the pan-Arabism of Nasser who, though secular, wanted to be the leader of the Arab camp and thus, in throwing in his lot with pan-Arabism, necessarily had to embrace the “Palestinian” cause. The resulting loss in June 1967 hastened his death, and diminished Egypt.

Among intelligent Egyptians, worried about their country, Taha Husain’s views have great appeal. And, not least, because they make perfect sense.