The Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan, in his four-volume work Egypt’s
Character (1980–84), claims that Egyptian identity is built of four components:
an African, an Asian, a Mediterranean and a Nile-related one. He speaks of
the ‘Arabization’ of the Egyptians on the one hand and of the ‘Egyptianiza-
tion’ of the Arabs on the other. Milad Hanna, a renowned Coptic writer,
published a book on the same subject which he called The Seven Pillars of
Egyptian Identity (1989). Four of the pillars he mentions are of a more or less
historical nature: the Pharaonic, the Greco-Roman, the Coptic-Christian and
the Islamic; the other three are geographic or cultural: the fact of belonging
to the Arab world, to the Mediterranean region and to Africa. By using his
pillar theory, and by avoiding any weighting according to importance or to
sustainability, Hanna tries to give a picture of a people that has preserved its
unity despite its internal cultural diversity.