In Wāhat al-ghurūb, Bahā’ Taher (2007) draws the contours of Egyptian race-consciousness using fiction, history, archeology, and biography. Centering the experience of Mahmūd Abdel Zahir, a stand-in character for Mahmoud Azmi––the District Commissioner at the Oasis––Taher explores the “circles of oppression” in the Siwa oasis, as a “colonized periphery” of nineteenth-century Egypt and Azmi’s connection to the ruinous event at the temple of Umm Ubaydah in 1897. Using Azmi’s first name, status, experience, and historical context at the close of the century as a scaffold, Taher constructs an imagined Egyptian subjectivity and masculinity informed by forces of change at the time. The novel grapples with racism in paradoxical ways manifesting in multiple triangulations where Mahmūd’s positionality constantly shifts between center and periphery. The impending presence of intertwining ailments of the nineteenth century: slavery, colonialism, and colonialism by proxy alongside a linear Egyptian anti-colonial nationalist movement illuminate the latter’s dualism on the question of liberation and autonomy. It shines a light on Egyptians’ undiagnosed “double consciousness.” The Egyptian nationalists’ (secular and/or religious) adoption of a repudiated European despotism and an applicable European culture binary falsely created an Egyptian affinity with whiteness, latching on to its roots in Egyptian consciousness as a result of the interlocking legacies of conquest and colonization by foreign forces and systems of governance. Failing to recognize white supremacy, its associates, agents, and victims easily leads to failing in constructing political and religious liberation ideas, theologies, vocabulary, and discourse that can correctly and justly speak to the particular grievances of the oppressed. Wāhat al-ghurūb is a novel pregnant with those tensions, awkward silences, and flawed harmonies and dissonances. Wāhat al-ghurūb offers itself, not as an antidote or a counter-amnesia, but as an awakening from a long Egyptian slumber regarding the question of slavery and the position of Black Africans in Egyptian imagination. It complicates Egyptians’ relationship with themselves, with those who are “othered” under the Egyptian gaze, and those who “other” Egyptians under their Black or White gaze. This article aims to present Egyptian race-consciousness through the triangulated encounters which constantly center and decenter Mahmūd and depict him as a liminal subject. This article examines the ways in which Mahmūd’s “double-consciousness” is rendered as he navigates multiple binaries as colonized-colonizer, master-slave, religious-unreligious, Egyptian-non-Egyptian.