The Dilemma of Egyptian Political and Cultural Decolonization

Despite the colonial presence of the British and their intense influence on Egyptian politics after the conclusion of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, several Egyptian intellectuals expressed much faith in the category of the human and advocated the notion of one humanity within a post-colonial critique of the Western worldview. However, I argue that their positions reveal the dilemma of Egyptian political and cultural decolonization. Focusing on the positions of three regular contributors to the Cairo-based cultural magazine Arrissalah which was one of the most popular cultural weeklies of the time, I show how Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, Abdul Monem Khallaf and Sayyid Qutb represent three interrelated responses to the Western conception of the human, particularly within the narrative of progress in a seemingly post-colonial moment. My aim is to explore how those intellectuals dealt with the dilemma of political and cultural decolonization i.e., the fascination with Western materialist progress in science, technology and art on the one hand, and the reluctance to accept the total assimilation into the colonizer’s worldview, on the other.