Category talk:American people of Egyptian descent

message: *The list of Arab Americans is rather comical. It used to list Jerry Seinfeld as an "Arab" until the last editor correctly removed him for the same reason that we are having this discussion. It's a list of people that others want to claim as "Arab", like they are trying to do with Egyptians, regardless of how the people in question identify themselves. 
*There is no such thing as "US official definition" of an Egyptian. US census, however, defines Egyptians simply as those who themselves "marked their ethnic origin as 'Egyptian'" . This means that unfortunately they might also be included by others under an Arab category, despite the fact that lots of Egyptian Americans categorically reject it. The US census does mention that given a choice between Middle Eastern and Arab descent, many choose the former. But to further complicate the issue, "The Arab Population: 2000" US census report says this, "...some people from these countries [in the Middle East] may not consider themselves to be Arab, and conversely, some people who consider themselves Arab may not be included in this definition. More specifically, groups such as Kurds and Berbers who are usually not considered Arab were included in this definition for consistency with 1990 census and Census 2000 data products" . So Berber and Kurdish Americans are subsumed into this definition "for consistency" (which is merely statistical), but would Berbers and Kurds be listed on Wikipedia as Arab or Arab American? Absurd!
*While the CIA World Fact Book, like the US census, is far from being an authority on such questions, it lists Egyptians as people of "Eastern Hamitic stock", i.e., of Northeast African descent, which includes Egyptians, some eastern Berbers, and some east African bedouins like the Beja .
*The definition of an Arab given at Arab American is the official Arab nationalist propaganda line—it purports to be inclusive of a wide range of people but uses an ethnochauvinist term like 'Arab American', rather than a more accurate geographic term like Middle-Eastern American, and superimposes it on all of those people. According to that definition, any ethnic group from Egyptians to Berbers to Persians to Kurds to Nubians to Turks should happily accept the imposition of that definition. The same goes for these statements, "the modern definition of an Arab is a national of an Arab country (22 countries as above). Their American descendants are therefore Arab Americans, all of whom have ancestors who spoke Arabic"—they sound like they are taken straight out of the Arab nationalist "manifesto"!! 
:1. A lot of people from those so-called Arab countries do not speak an Arabic language at all.
:2. Egyptians speak an Arabic-derived language, Masri, much like Maltese is 'Arabic';
:3. Even then, language does not necessarily equate with ethnicity. French-speaking Africans are not "French" anymore than Egyptians are "Arab"!
:4. Egyptian Americans maintain a distinct ethnic and communal organization, as do Egyptians elsewhere in the West;
:5. Only members of the Egyptian community are qualified on what or how they choose to identify themselves, not according to how they are seen by others.
As I said, affiliation with Arabism is constantly questioned by Egyptians. Here is what prominent Egyptian American Harvard professor Leila Ahmed says about this whole issue in her autobiography A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey (1999) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux;
:The year was 1952, the year of [Nasser's coup d'état] ... I remember how I hated the incessant rhetoric. Al-qawmiyya al-Arabiyya! Al-Uruba! Nahnu al-Arab! Arab nationalism! Arabness! We the Arabs! Even now just remembering those words, I feel again a surge of mingled irritation and resentment. Propaganda is unpleasant... Imagine what it would be like if say, the British or the French were incessantly told, with nobody allowed to contest, question, or protest, that they were now European, and only European... But for us [Egyptians] it was actually worse and certainly more complicated.
:Egyptians, who in that era [before Nasser] were preoccupied with getting rid of the British, were either uninterested in or positively hostile to this strange Syrian idea of an Arab identity ... Well into the first decades of this century, neither the self-defined new Arabs nor the Egyptians themselves thought that this new identity had anything to do with Egyptians ...[But today,] there are two different notions of Arab that I am trapped in [the Arab nationalist notion and a Western racist notion]—both false, both heavily weighted and cargoed with another and silent freight. Both imputing to me feelings and beliefs that aren't mine.
:...the steady spread and imposition of this culture of [Arab] literacy throughout the Arab world seems to represent a kind linguistic and cultural imperialism—a linguistic, cultural, and also a class imperialism that is being conducted in the name of education and of Arab unity and of the oneness of the Arab nation. Steadily throughout the Arab world, as this Arab culture of literacy marches inexorably onward, local cultures continue to be erased and their linguistic and cultural creativity condemned to permanent, unwritten silence. And we are supposed to applaud this, not protest it as we would if it were any other form of imperialism or political domination. This variety of domination goes by the name of "nationalism," and we are supposed to support it.
— Zerida 01:45, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Egyptian self-identification

message: I'm removing the protection for now, as no discussion has taken place for a while. Please do not start another revert war- if you need to discuss the issue further do so here before editing the category. Petros471 10:16, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Protection