Muhammad Raūf bāšā (1832-1882) was one of the high-ranking officers in the Turco- Egyptian army, who played a major role in Egypt's imperialist enterprise in north-east Africa during the 1870-1880's. Most of the researches which dealt with Raūf bāšā tended to portray his military and administrative achievements during his service in the Equatorial districts (1871-1873), as Governor General (Hukumdār) of Harar (1875-1878) and of Sudan (1880-1882). Some of the post-revolution Egyptian historians recruited Raūf bāšā's to the Egyptian national narrative, neglecting the 19th century's Ottoman contexts of Egypt. Within that national narrative Raūf became an 'Egyptian' deprived hero, who reflected in his personal story the history of the 'oppressed' nation, which was burglarized by the British Empire since 1882. The paper reexamines Raūf bāšā's neither through a 'narrow' national prism nor by means of significant military successes or defeats. It contends that Raūf bāšā was a multifaceted identities character, who perceived and imagined his 'Egyptian homeland' through his varies identities. Being the descendant of apparently Berberine father and Ethiopian mother, Raūf bāšā was from an African origin. Nevertheless, he was an integral part of the emerging identity of the Turco-Egyptian elite as a local, though still Ottoman, Egypt. Raūf bāšā and his Egyptian collogues were also known within the majority of the occupied African Muslim communities as 'Turks' or 'Arabs'. To this tempestuous discourse of identities were added the Egyptian hybrid message of 'mission civilisatrice' alongside "corrective re-Islamization", which may have defined the occupier's ideology and part of the Ottoman colonial context at that time. The paper demonstrates how these varied identities shaped Raūf bāšā personality and his colonial perceptions simultaneously with the process of 'imagining' his own Egypt. Raūf bāšā's new Egypt was generally a new entity which integrated its Turco-Egyptian identities with pre-national and national new set of identities. The paper is based on a variety of published and unpublished sources in French, English, Italian and Arabic. Primary sources include Harari and Ethiopian chronicles and reports on oral research conducted in Harar, and official Egyptian correspondence containing reports, maps, and discussions of the town and its hinterlands too. Other primary archival sources included British, French and Italian correspondence, as well as diaries and letters of agents, traders, and missionaries who visited the town. .