AHC - "Native" Egypt Surviving

What would be the requirements of a native Egyptian state (that is non-Arab) surviving in the modern day?

Would Islamic rule need to be completely avoided or could the native Egyptian population convert to Islam while still maintaining their distinct Egyptian identity á la Persia? Or would we need to butterfly away the Romans and the Ptolemies to have any chance of an Egypt culturally, linguistically and racially descended from the Ancient Egyptian nation?

Bonus points if this state isn't Coptic or significantly influenced culturally or linguistically by Greeks.

You could have one of the Egyptian revolts against the Ptolemies to succeed. Or you could have Egypt succeed against Alexander. Once the Diadochi period comes around, people will be too busy fighting among themselves to conquer Egypt. Having the Egyptians retain their culture in spite of the Arab invasion is intriguing but why didn't this happen IOTL?

AFAIK the latest point at which the bonus goals could be met to a reasonable degree would be the biggest native revolt against the Ptolemies by Horwennefer. It's been suggested as a POD before although I know of no timelines exploring that angle, but it seems plausible enough to suggest that he could win his war against the Greeks and reestablish pharoanic rule.

leopard9 said:

You could have one of the Egyptian revolts against the Ptolemies to succeed. Or you could have Egypt succeed against Alexander. Once the Diadochi period comes around, people will be too busy fighting among themselves to conquer Egypt. Having the Egyptians retain their culture in spite of the Arab invasion is intriguing but why didn't this happen IOTL?

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Mostly cause they didn't lose their identity (per se, it's not that simple and they certainly knew who they were) when the arabs moved in, their independence was pissed on and off by the Persian invasions with a few intermissions of rule which ended with Macedonian rule. The Ptolemies are a strange mix, but the head of the system was a foreigner all the same and that got worse under Roman rule, literally centuries of never owning your land does strange things to a people and more centuries of foreign rule didn't do a thing to help that.

I'm not sure why Egypt went full Arab, but they didn't have a full culture to preserve, just an echo to hold onto.

Egypt only developed the Arab identity during the time of Nasser, so making it have its own identity could happen after 1900.

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:

AFAIK the latest point at which the bonus goals could be met to a reasonable degree would be the biggest native revolt against the Ptolemies by Horwennefer. It's been suggested as a POD before although I know of no timelines exploring that angle, but it seems plausible enough to suggest that he could win his war against the Greeks and reestablish pharoanic rule.

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Not to derail the thread, but the timeline in my sig actually does have the Great Revolt of the Egyptians succeed and explores the butterflies that result from that.

IOTL this happened due to:

-Extensive arab settlement
-Having an arab ruling class
-Extensive trade with the nearby, ever growing arab speaking world

Also it was the language of the quran, the holiest book of their new state religion. Translations of which were generally frowned upon. The persians did it very early on, though.

If you butterfly away that settlement (let's say the arabs focus more on settling syria/iraq) and have the egyptians successfully break away early on (and maybe crown this feat with a coptic translation of the quran,) I think their native language has a fighting chance.

Also, the language had very little prestige. By the time of the islamic conquest, it had been the language of a conquered people for over a millennium (for this reason also, they had little to no military tradition.) Unlike, say, Persian... which was held in very high regard in its part of the world.

This makes an early egyptian revolt paramount. Ideally, have muslim egyptians break off during the abbassid chaos and bring in some foreigners to drill their troops.

- Widespread distribution of clandestine Coptic translations of Quran.
- Arab ruling class hiring more Coptic-speaking servants to the point that the succeeding were speaking Coptic/Egyptian language.
- Ibn Washiya being fascinated with ancient Egyptian tales and history he compiled it into a single epic a la "Shah-nameh".

Enigmajones said:

Egypt only developed the Arab identity during the time of Nasser, so making it have its own identity could happen after 1900.

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This. In the first half of the 20th C., Egyptians did not view themselves as Arab for the most part. And pre-Ottoman collapse, Arab was a term mainly applied to bedouins and people from the Arabian peninsula, not people from Egypt or the Levant.

SlideAway said:

This. In the first half of the 20th C., Egyptians did not view themselves as Arab for the most part. And pre-Ottoman collapse, Arab was a term mainly applied to bedouins and people from the Arabian peninsula, not people from Egypt or the Levant.

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What matters to me is what the people were not what they believed themselves to be. Were these people Arabs in all but name or something older?

✓ speak arabic
✓ follow sunni islam
✓ pre-islamic culture gone
✓ consider themselves to be arabs

even its official name is the arab republic of egypt

Zlorfik said:

even its official name is the arab republic of egypt

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Again, this was because of Nasser's pan-Arab machinations; prior to this, while Egypt considered itself a part of the Islamic world and spoke Arabic as a majority language, it did not consider itself "Arab" in a nationalistic sense.

Having Egypt somehow triumph during the Oriental Crisis and continue Ali's reforms may also act as an effective POD, depending on the level of autonomy Egypt gains not only from the Ottomans, but also from the Europeans.

There is definitely a significant impact of "arab-ism" on Islam that's not necessarily based on core religious tenets. Years ago I was at a graduate level course with lots of different guest speakers, many focused on terrorism (Islamic and otherwise). During one discussion on how, over the last few decades, radical Islam had become a mechanism for motivating many terrorists, the speaker (a muslim from Pakistan or Iran) made the point that in the current worldwide Islamic population, there are things derived from the Quran and then there's "this arab thing." He made the point that many things that we see in radical Islam today stem from aspects of the Arab mindset, not from the religion itself. However, since Islam is so Arab-focused (language, holy sites, etc), many Muslims around the world accept much of this "Arab thing" as part of their religion.

The only disagreement from the many Muslims in the room was that an officer from Saudi argued that there's really no such thing as Wahabbiism, which everyone found hard to accept.

Iran's culture, language and ethnic make up have been heavily influenced by the Arabs and later the Turks, yet they still retain the Persian culture, cuisine, language and identity to a very large extent. The problem for Egypt is that It's almost inevitably going to end up being one of the most important regions in the Caliphate, along with the Mashriq. It's part of the Fertile Crescent and the native language is Afro-Asiatic, as is Arabic, and so it's much easier to absorb than the Indo-European Persian language.

You'd need to find some way to have the Arabs not be so imposing of their language and culture on citizens which really requires an entirely different early Islamic history, or otherwise have Egypt rebel and gain independence or be retaken by Christians.

Enigmajones said:

Egypt only developed the Arab identity during the time of Nasser, so making it have its own identity could happen after 1900.

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In 1945, several years before Nasser's rise to power, Egypt was a founding member of the Arab League.

It is true that during the 1920's and 1930's, Egyptian nationalism took a "Pharaonist" rather than pan-Arab identity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaonism Yet this was itself a relatively recent development. In the 1890's Friedrich Ratzel could write, "In the Egyptians of to-day we have before us a substantive race, descended in a direct line from the Egyptians of old, even though for the sake of language and religion it calls itself Arab, for it likes to think itself of one stock with the Prophet, and therefore superior to the Turks who usurped the Caliphate. .." https://books.google.com/books?id=JKmBAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA190