This is the second part of my interview with Mohammad Ali Salih. As I mentioned in part one, he reached out to me here on my blog and sent a number of questions. Last January, I wrote up some answers to these questions, and I’ve decided to share them here. The rest of the conversation follows:

• You avoided describing the Egyptians as “black” and used “people of color”. Isn’t this, also, alien to them, as to Arabs who live in the U.S?

The notion of the “color line” is a social imaginary dividing between white people and non-white people. This is an idea that was clearly meaningful in both the British and the Egyptian primary sources I was reading about the ELC. Many British officers did actually refer to Egyptians as “Black,” usually using less polite, more derogatory language to signal the same thing. Egyptian nationalists, especially those middle-class strivers who styled themselves as effendi, largely rejected British attempts to categorize Egyptians alongside Black Africans.

Chapter 8 of my book dives into the writings of nationalist intellectuals and activists who did a lot of writing about how Egyptians have a unique racial identity that is neither Black, “Muslim” (a category that was shot through with racial undertones in British imperial thought at the time), nor “Arab.” This sense of Egyptianness as a racial identity—one that links people living in Egypt today with the ancient Pharaohs from millennia ago—is similar to what scholars in other contexts have called racial nationalism.  The notion of a unique Egyptian racial identity, I argue, was heavily influenced by a reaction against British attempts to define Egyptians as “people of color” alongside Black Africans during the First World War.

While Egyptians have gone through waves of cultural pan-Africanism since the First World War, this strong emotional reaction against attempts to define Egyptians–especially ancient Egyptians–alongside Black Africans persists in Egypt up until today. We can see it in the current controversy over Kevin Hart’s recent performance, or in the widespread social media campaigns against “Afrocentrism.” (Or, for that matter, the campaign against the Netflix documentary “Cleopatra,” which emerged after I wrote these words).

• How did the ELC experience contribute to the nationalist movement of 1919?

We’ve already talked a bit about how it contributed symbolically: Enrolling massive numbers of Egyptians into a coercive labor regime reminiscient of slavery helped nationalist activists and intellectuals understand that they had been racialized as people of color, and they reacted by articulating a distinct notion of Egyptian racial identity that emphasized Egyptian difference from and superiority to Black Africans.

Practically, mass recruitment for the ELC throughout the countryside enraged people and sparked widespread protests and demonstrations dating as far back as May 1918. My research uncovered at least 35 incidents during the summer before the formation of the wafd. Saad Zaghlul was aware of these demonstrations and personally witnessed them. When he was arrested and exiled in March 1919, likely the very same people who had come out the year before to protest ELC recruitment came out and protests against the British colonial regime that was holding him. So anger about the ELC provided fuel for the fire, and the protest movement launched by the wafd was the spark that got things going.

• Commenting on Heshmat’s book, you wrote: “When the 1919 revolution took place, the people of Qina did not share in the romantic nationalism.” Isn’t a revolution usually a “totalizing story about national unity centered in (cities)”?

Most of our ideas about revolution come from the most well-known historical examples of the phenomenon: the glorious revolution in the UK, the American revolution, and especially the French and Russian revolutions. These were all urban-centered and led by relatively small cadres of intellectuals and activists. But not every revolution has played out this way. Famously, the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Algerian revolutions all really gathered momentum when they moved away from the cities and focused their organizing on the countryside.

I think Mona El-Ghobashy’s recent book on the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt provides a framework that can help us make sense of the events of 1919. In that book, El-Ghobashy tries to clarify debates about whether or not what happened in Egypt from 2011-2013 counts as a “revolution” by replacing the concept with the more fluid notion of a “revolutionary situation.” While a revolution is usually seen as being led by a particular movement that replaces and re-constitutes the government along pre-conceived lines, a revolutionary situation is a dynamic unsettling of social and political norms, such that a more messy and contingent re-constitution of power becomes possible for a period of time. As Dina Heshmat puts it in her description of 1919, we have to shift from thinking about it as a “movement” and instead understand it as part of a broader “moment” that extends from 1918 to 1923. The ELC and protests surrounding it were just one element of this destabilizing moment, and I think a complete history of the 1919 revolution still remains to be written.

• What do you think of arguments that Western colonialism (here British in Egypt), also, contributed to the political, economic and social advancement of the colonized?

Muriam Haleh Davis recently made a comment on facebook about FIFA that really put this question in perspective for me: Western colonialism is a historical fact. It is not something we can simply snap our fingers and make disappear. During the hundred-odd years it impacted Egypt, for example, people reacted to it in different ways at different places and times. One of the most significant legacies of African post-colonial thinkers, in my mind, has been a recognition that simply boycotting all survivals of colonialism, including colonial borders, does not equate with decolonization. The conditions of possibility for political and economic independence—which is to say, constitutions, parliaments, physical infrastructures, modern ideas—may be rooted at least partially in Western colonial practices.

Saying we should denounce something simply because it is a product of colonialism ignores the complicated motivations at play for those historical actors actually subject to colonial regimes of power. We need to be aware that violence and extraction took place, yes, and reparations should be paid to the families of those who made enormous concentrations of power and wealth possible. But people who worked within colonial regimes—including the young men of the ELC who re-enrolled for multiple tours of duty—had an actual influence on the regimes they found themselves within, and were actually co-creators of these systems of power. They are not just empty signifiers as powerless “slaves” or “volunteer” collaborators. As Haleh Davis put it in her comment, this begs the question: “should we unilaterally condemn all cultural products that were conditioned by colonialism in the first (but perhaps not the last) instance?”

In my book, I try to reserve condemnation and work to understand the historical actors expressing themselves through the sources on their own terms. That’s the interpretative task of the historian. As for the political task of decolonization, that’s really not for me to say.