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Egyptian Historical Research and Writing on Egypt in the 20th Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles

Extract

A few years ago the Egyptian government appointed a committee of historians with a mandate to re-write the history of Egypt, making it commensurate with current needs. Those who opposed the plan raised indignant cries of ‘revisionism’ on the one hand, to be countered by equally heated accusations on the part of those who were in favour of the undertaking that much of the works of the past had been mostly white-wash attempts, or panegyrics addressed to the royal family and the old regime, and that the history of Egypt needed to be properly written. The reactions that the project aroused made it demonstrably clear that Egyptians had become keenly interested in their own history, in the manner in which it was written and in the people who were writing it. It should therefore come as no surprise to note that the number of Egyptians writing on the history of Egypt has multiplied rapidly within the last two decades.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1973

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References

Footnotes

1. That is the way he himself chose to spell his name. Otherwise I have used as simplified a method of transliteration as possible.

2. I have inserted the place of publication only when it was other than Cairo.