Occidentalism and Cultural Identity

The cultural identity of any nation is not a simple self-identical concept. It is more like a lived experience that can be known by experiencing the cultural milieu and being acquainted with the nation's cultural products. As an intellectual endeavour, the attempt to understand cultural identity, nevertheless, necessarily involves conceptualization. Due to their abstract nature, concepts both reveal and conceal cultural identity. Hassan Hanafy and Gaber Asfour offer two different and even opposed accounts of Egyptian cultural and national identity. Hanafy offers an Islamic-oriented vision and Asfour a liberal one. By abstracting a simple concept from a multi-dimensional entity, both Hanafy and Asfour cover the other dimensions of the entity they seek to conceptualize. Fetishizing a particular concept leads to neglect of the other components that supplement it but which are denied in its harmonious constitution. As a result of this fetishism, both fall into self-contradiction, revealing the rich diffuseness and the self-contradictoriness of the entity that extends beyond these concepts. Dialogue between the two intellectual positions is interrupted by these fetishisms. No third concept synthesizing the liberal and the Islamic components will be offered, for such a concept will necessarily cover other dimensions of the Egyptian national and cultural identity, which can be understood as the entity giving rise to, yet not subsumed by, these concepts.