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 The paper is based on a variety of published and unpublished sources in French, English, Italian and Arabic.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. .

For decades two prevailing trends in Egypt have influenced the status of religious minorities: a liberal trend that recognizes the crucial role of minorities in constructing a pluralistic society, and an Islamist trend that has a puritanical and exclusionary vision of society. Islamism has contributed to sectarian tensions and violence since 1972, when the growth of conservative ideologies and constitutional changes under President Anwar Sadat marked the beginning of long-term deprivation of minorities from religious freedom. This paper categorizes the hundreds of incidents of sectarian violence involving Muslims and Christians into three main clusters: 1) Socio-Religious Issues, 2) Political Issues, and 3) Economic Issues. Problematically, successive governments have not provided a proper mechanism to resolving sectarian tensions. Instead they have limited the visibility of minorities. They have required official permits for church construction, and have not permitted Shia Muslims and Baha’is to have their own places of worship. Security forces have often encouraged customary reconciliatory meetings outside the jurisdiction of the courts. This paper argues that systematic discrimination toward religious minorities has rendered them second-class citizens. According to Valentine Moghadam, revolutions can either result in “inclusionary” or “exclusionary” policies. In the case of Egypt, post-revolutionary politics did not improve minority status. Emboldened Islamists increasingly spoke of Christians and Shias as enemies of Islam. Because Christians supported the June 30th mass demonstrations and the military coup, systematic violence targeted their churches, schools, institutions, cultural centers, shops and homes. The recurrence of attacks on churches, forced displacement of Christians, and accusations of contempt for religion demonstrate the urgent need for state policies that foster national integration of minorities. The alternative would be sectarianized religious identities and a diminishing Christian population, as has happened in Iraq and Syria and reported by scholars such as Reza Aslan and Paul Sedra. Will a new post-revolutionary government develop a transformative agenda to address religious discrimination and unresolved sectarian tensions, or will there be structural factors that resist change? To address this question, the paper will examine the role of the state, the role of religious leaders, and the level of importance the majority places on a pluralistic Egyptian society. Methodologically, I completed fieldwork in Egypt between March and November 2013, and over 116 in-depth interviews with politicians, security personnel, church and mosque leaders, Shias and Baha’is, victims of sectarian strife, activists, and members of human rights organizations and civil society.

The head count of Egyptian Christians has long been contentious, erupting yet again in the struggle over quotas and representation in the drafting of Egypt’s post-2011 constitutions. This question is usually treated in by one-dimensional quantitative assessments, pitting claims of persistent undercounts against assertions that historical census returns are roughly accurate. Moving away from simple body counts, this paper approaches the “Coptic census” with a method based on the interpretation of beliefs and meanings held by socially constituted actors. Employing media archives, policy documents, and other archival sources, mainly in Arabic, I trace the historical trajectory of quantitative claims regarding the size of the Christian population of Egypt alongside the evolving stances of various actors contesting these claims. These diverse actors include the Egyptian statistical authorities, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and lay Coptic activists in Egypt and in the diaspora. The Egyptian Christian relationship to the census is far more historically contingent than dominant narratives allow. What was a relatively narrow quantitative gap between Christian demographic claims and the census in the early 1900s opened into a much wider gap by mid-century. Moreover the dispute became more polyvocal as lay activists, first in Egypt and then abroad, offered ever-higher estimates, challenging the authority of Church and state alike. Christian demographic claims have consequently changed more rapidly than census results. I argue that these changes in the Christian relationship to the Egyptian census are rooted in social transformations and cleavages within the Christian community, and in the changing relationship of Christians to the state. I identify multiple contests over the census, not just between Church and state, but also within the Coptic community itself. At stake are not only the results of the census but also its social and political meaning, and who possesses the authority to produce quantitative figures for the Christian population. I finally analyze the claims of various actors to the authority to produce these data, including appeals to domestic and international law, and to international statistical standards. Against dominant interpretations I argue that, by withholding census results since 1996 and more recently through creative re-interpretation of international statistical guidance, Egyptian officials have in fact endeavored to de-politicize the census, but have been careful not to cede authority over the census itself. The paper closes with an application of the above interpretive framework to the contest over quotas and minority representation in the post-2011 constitutions.