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“Minorities Are Like Microbes”: On Secularism and Sectarianism in English-Occupied Egypt, 1882–1922

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a novel concept—minority—exploded globally. Previously used to refer to childhood, the term also now described nondominant religious and ethnic groups. This conceptual innovation—hardly value neutral—marked a shift in how states related to their subjects and territories. While the Minority Treaties imposed by the League of Nations on new Eastern European states are often seen as inaugurating the global debate over minority rights, activists from Cairo to Dublin and Delhi to Xinjiang debated these for a decade prior to 1919. This article examines the first minority rights debates in the Middle East, over the status of Egypt’s Christian inhabitants in 1911. Rather than viewing minority status as an imperial imposition or imitation of a European idea, the article demonstrates how it emerged as a response to the creation of a sectarian “Great Islamic State” under the aegis of the British occupation.