These terms were the new vocabulary of modern nationalism, and their perceived misunderstanding and misuse created a national crisis: the Western values inherent in these eight words clashed with the cultural background of the Egyptians. The impact of the colonizers on language and social identity was a breakdown of local culture (Said 1975, 1979; Abuhamida 1988; Mitchell 1988). Saids (1975, 1979) controversial research on Orientalism sharply criticizes Western Orientalists for perpetrating this linguistic imperialism and rendering the Arabic language chaotic and random. Said points to textual biases in literature about the Orient. He claims, for instance, that Arabs are metaphorically associated with hot-blooded sexual prowess (416), while institutionally or culturally they are nil, or next to nil (416). The use of sexual metaphor to describe male and female Arabs was the Orientalists way of dealing with the great variety and potency of Arab diversity, whose source is if not intellectual and social then sexual and biological (416). These ideological forces gave rise to linguistic conflicts in post-colonial Egypt: the desires for historical and linguistic nostalgia on one hand, and for modernization of language and society on the other. Religious conservatives, fueled with anti-Western sentiments and historical nostalgia, argue for a superiority of CA, and its purity is strongly anchored in Muslim Arab history, morality, and nationalism (Suleiman 2003, 2004; Haeri 2003). They relate authentic Egyptian identity to Islamic laws and values that are uncorrupted by the West (Suleiman 2003, 2004; Haeri 2003). This causes the religious conservatives to fight to keep CA undiluted with foreign borrowings. Suleiman (2004) points to military warfare metaphors in their Arabic rhetoric, such as language regiment, defense of the national language, and enemies of Islam Language Ideologies in the Arabic Diglossia of Egypt3(50), while they are projected as holy warriors, garrisoned troops, and patrons of Classical Arabic (49). Any modernization of CA is lahn linguistic corruption, hadm wa-takhrib sabotage, or ghazw invasion, aimed at destroying the Quran and the hadith the Prophetic Traditions (50). In contrast, pan-Arab nationalists propose a united Arabic language MSA - to be the unifying force of all Arabic-speaking people in the Arab world.(Abuhamida 1988; Suleiman 2003; Haeri 2003; amongst many). These idealistic nationalists argue for a written language that is mutually comprehensible in all Arab nations and unifies the Arab world. One proponent of this view is the Egyptian government, which has been controlling the modernization of CA byoverseeing institutions of learning, publishing, and social affairs since the middle of the nineteenth century (Haeri 2003; Van Mol 2003). The government is mainly concerned with revitalizing CA as a means of achieving social, economic, and political progress for Egypt. According to Haeri (2003), state officials, Egyptian intellectuals, educators, and high bureaucrats regard CA as too literary, flowery, and lacking in modern vocabulary needed for science and technology on a global scale. Nevertheless, many voices point to the predicament that Egyptian Arabic, the vernacular, is ignored in writing and education, even though it is the mother tongue of Egyptians and the lingua franca used in face-to-face interaction. In this view, Egyptian Arabic cannot be