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→Egyptians are not Arabs
:::Gamal Nasser, the father of the hyper-secular Arab nationalist movement that laid the foundations for Sadam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, is largely responsible for the notion that Egyptians are Arabs. As someone who has spent a great deal of time in Egypt, I can assure everybody that this is most definitely NOT the case amongst average Egyptians. Even Egyptian Muslims in Cairo and Alexandria almost never identify themselves as Arabs, and as far as Coptics go, well, have your running shoes on if you plan on asking one of them if they are ;) And in Upper Egypt (Luxor, Aswan, et al) most everybody is a Nubian. It's only out in the scant handful of oasis villages where people claim Arab (and specifically Bedouin) descent. [[User:ShlomSaydetLibnan|ShlomSaydetLibnan]] 00:10, 12 February 2009 (EST)
:::Gamal Nasser, the father of the hyper-secular Arab nationalist movement that laid the foundations for Sadam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, is largely responsible for the notion that Egyptians are Arabs. As someone who has spent a great deal of time in Egypt, I can assure everybody that this is most definitely NOT the case amongst average Egyptians. Even Egyptian Muslims in Cairo and Alexandria almost never identify themselves as Arabs, and as far as Coptics go, well, have your running shoes on if you plan on asking one of them if they are ;) And in Upper Egypt (Luxor, Aswan, et al) most everybody is a Nubian. It's only out in the scant handful of oasis villages where people claim Arab (and specifically Bedouin) descent. [[User:ShlomSaydetLibnan|ShlomSaydetLibnan]] 00:10, 12 February 2009 (EST)
::::OK. Modern Egypt is a mixed society. There are some Arabs in Egypt, as there were until the 1950's many Jews, Greeks etc. However modern Egyptian culture and language is very different to elsewhere in the Middle East. Egyptian Arabic is almost entirely different to Gulf Arabic, and contains huge amounts of Coptic-Egyptian loan words. Egyptian culture is also entirely different to Arab culture. The reason Egypt is seen as a part of the Arab world is it speaks for it. Egypt is the biggest cultural weight in the region, the biggest population. For a long time Cairo was the capital of the Islamic empire and so it identifies with the Arab world by virtue of a shared religion and shared literature and cultural aspects of that period. Al Azhar is THE cultural heart of the Arab world and that is in Cairo. The Citadel was the heart of the Islamic empire in one of it's most important periods, and that is in Cairo. In modern times, Egypt is the cultural gel in the Arab world. Most Arabs can understand Egyptian Arabic, much more than vice versa.
::::Egypt is an "Arab nation" for similar reasons to the UK being head of the Commonwealth. A mix of colonial legacies, vanished empires and quirks of history. But most Egyptians are not Arabs, even though they have picked up a generous helping of Arab culture and language along the way. However, there are many advantages for her in being an "Arab nation", regardless of technicalities.
::::As for Upper Egypt. Kom Ombo and Aswan are the only two cities in the region with significant Nubian populations, and they only arrived in the area in large numbers following the completion of the Aswan Dam. Most of them lived from Aswan upward before this stretch of the valley was flooded. However, Upper Egypt was, and still is, mostly Egyptian.
::::Incidentally, it was the Romans, upon adopting Christianity, not the Islamic conquest, that destroyed Pharaonic culture. When the Arabs arrived, the destruction was already complete.--[[User:Krysg|Krysg]] 19:22, 1 April 2009 (EDT)