Imran Abdullah
The expert and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass said that Egyptians are not Arabs or Africans, but people of "special origin."
"We speak Arabic but we are not Arabs. We say we are in Africa but we are not Africans," Hawass said in a lecture to Cairo University students.
Hawass considered that the pharaonic nature of the Egyptians did not change "despite the invasions that Egypt has suffered through the ages."
The remarks of the Egyptian archaeologist and expert close to the authorities provoked critical reactions. The writer and scholar Mohammed Saif Al Dawla likened Hawass to claims by the late writer Tawfiq al-Hakim in 1978 when he wanted to justify the peace decision with Israel. In World War II.
Saif al-Dawla continued in a post on his Facebook page, saying that Hawass's statements come in the context of "false refined and reserved" arguments that pose the Pharaonic civilization in the face of Arab-Islamic civilization, or the Egyptian nation against the Arab nation, or describe the Arab-Islamic conquest invasion and colonialism.
These allegations, which aim to strip Egypt and its people of its Arab identity and civilizational identity, raise the slogan "Egypt first", but its reality is subordination to America and Israel, and "the interests of the ruler, his regime, his followers and allies of the country's capabilities," he said.
DNA analysis studies of dozens of ancient Egyptian mummies, including mummified bodies in the archaeological area of Abu Sir dating back to the Middle Pharaonic period, revealed that the sample in question carries more convergence with the population from the Near East and the Levant than the contemporary Egyptians, while increasing the assets of sub-Saharan Africa The largest in the post-Roman period, according to a study published in 2017 in the journal Nature and the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Other studies have shown that modern Egyptians have deep genetic links with people in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa, but their ancestors had stronger ties with Middle Easterners, according to the history and geography of human genes from Princeton University Press.
Egypt character
In his famous book "The Personality of Egypt: A Study in the Genius of the Place," the Egyptian strategic and geographical thinker Gamal Hamdan considered that Egypt is geographically located in Africa but has also been to Asia historically.
Hamdan believes that describing the Arab world outside the Arabian Peninsula as "Arabized" is inaccurate, Arabism is a culture, not race and sex.
He draws attention to the fact that the old time and the rainy age witnessed a population densely disturbed but connected and mixed and highly mobile and migration and travel and there is no room for isolation or purity as he put it.
Hamdan said that after the rainy era, drought came, and each group of people gathered in a limited area, meaning that the demographic spots geographically, but "remain sexually homogeneous," which is the key to the anthropology of the Arab world, in the words of Hamdan.
Hamdan, who has written 39 books, demonstrates his idea that the mixing of blood and the fusion of expatriate Arabs and indigenous peoples has become an indisputable historical fact. Conversely, the dubious claims of Egypt's Arabism are politicized and unscientific.
Grandfather Pharaonic and Arab father
Hamdan does not differentiate between Arabism "east and west of Suez", the peoples of the region before the Arabs and before Islam are "relatives" originally share and homogeneous in race, and cites the marriage of the Prophet Ibrahim "Iraqi" Hajar "Egyptian", adding that the Adnanian Arabs are the sons of Ismail from the wife Egyptian.
Although Hamdan emphasized the continuity of the "Egyptian personality" since the Pharaohs to date - including dozens of social and cultural features and old words and tools still used in modern Egypt - Egypt is changing, and continuity is a kind of accumulation and knew Pharaonic papyrus on which the Bible and the Koran , While ancient Egyptian writing still exists as well.
He believes that the continuity of Egypt is cumulative, overlapping and moderate, and formulates his idea with the words "grandfather of the Pharaonic and the Arab father," stressing the integration and overlap between the Arab, Islamic, Coptic and Pharaonic affiliations.
Although he pointed out that the vast Egyptian deserts played a role in curbing migrations and invasions, Hamdan points out that history emphasizes the common roots of the Arabs, including 14 centuries that brought the Arab peoples together under one framework, and they are also relatives of Islam.
He believed that the Arabic language included many "Semitic" words, and the Egyptians knew the overlap and intermarriage before and after Arabization and before and after Islam, noting the great Egyptian victories achieved in the Arab era, such as confronting the Tatars and the Crusaders.