Benedict Anderson has characterized nationalism as the creation of “an imagined political community.” “Communities,” he observed, “are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” Anderson's approach is useful for understanding the complex evolution of Egyptian national identity over the first half of the twentieth century. On one level nationalism in Egypt in this period was a network of several imaginings, in part overlapping but also partially incommensurate, which vied for primacy as the dominant conception of what Egypt was and should be.

The collapse of Ottoman religio-political order after World War I, along with the more extended social processes of the weakening and/or dissolution of the traditional family, village, and tribal communities, religious brotherhoods, and urban solidarities of quarter and guild, eroded the basis of the older concepts of community held by previous generations of Egyptians. These processes created an urgent need to redefine the collective image of Egypt in terms congruent with current conditions. It was this need which gave birth to the different new imaginings of Egypt which developed in the early twentieth century.

Structurally, these alternative images of Egypt can be divided into two major systems. The first was a territorially bounded imagining with a Western coloration; the second was a set of cultural and ethnic imaginings based on Islamic, Arab, and Eastern materials. In the immediate post-1919 era, it was the territorial and Western-influenced image of Egypt which achieved dominance in Egyptian cultural and political life.