This paper traces the introduction and effects of the concept “minority” in early twentieth-century Egypt. After World War I, the newly established League of Nations made the concept “minority” a legal category in an attempt to protect vulnerable groups in new states (although, ironically, not in Great Power states, where protection was also in need). The category functioned similarly to what Ian Hacking terms a “human kind,” recruiting the identification of ethnic, national, and/or religious groups for whom the League of Nations afforded a set of collective rights it had little ability to enforce. Rather than ensuring inclusion or even security for these groups, it enacted their differentiation and exclusion. In Egypt, the Arabic term for “minority,” aqliyya, came into use in the early 1920s. However, minority politics emerged earlier, particularly among the Copts though arguably among other non-Muslim groups as well. In 1911, a group of Coptic laymen organized the Coptic Congress in Asyut to demand collective rights from the colonial state on the basis of their minoritarian identification. The congress was soon contested by the Muslim Congress—later renamed the Egyptian Congress—which refuted the claims of the Copts. Intense and often acrimonious debate over whether state law should recognize minorities, and if so, over the privileges minorities should enjoy, continued until the 1919 revolt, when Egyptians are often said to have united in anti-colonial resistance. The subsequent 1923 constitution built on this unity by not acknowledging the existence of minorities. This paper analyzes comparatively the complex encounters of Coptic, non-Coptic Christian, and Jewish groups with the concept “minority.” Hannah Arendt has argued that in Europe, the best protected minority groups were those associated with majorities elsewhere, while minorities par excellence, or those nowhere forming majorities (i.e., Armenians and Jews), often became refugees or stateless people. However, I argue that in Egypt, where the nation-state formed under colonial rule, the opposite was true. Christians originating from Bilad al-Sham, who were tied to new nation-states that the British and French carved out of the Ottoman Empire, were largely excluded; the status of Armenians and Jews remained as nebulous as that of the Armenian and Jewish national projects; while Copts, who were nowhere a majority and often thought to be “original Egyptians,” most clearly formed a national minority. The paper promises to contribute to our understanding of the emergence of minorities, minority politics, and citizenship in the Middle East.