Abstract The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non‐west. This ‘non‐west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this reinforces the centrality of Anglocentric questions through an add‐and‐stir approach), but to acknowledge these traditions as evolving, and possibly problematic but always already in conversation with worldly intellectual and geopolitical traditions. To do this from the vantage point of Egypt, I start with the specific moment of post‐independence to show how it was complex and imbricated in intellectual inheritances, shifting geopolitical orders, national revisions of worldly orientations and geopolitical ambitions. For many, an Egyptian regional geographic imagination finds its bedrock in the post‐independence moment. It was at this time that Egypt, as an anticolonial world actor, sought to redefine its geopolitical global and regional commitments. Indeed, the post‐independence moment saw a strong and forceful regional geographical imagination and praxis, in politics as well as in intellectual geography.
Aya Nassar (Sun,) studied this question.