It is difficult to think of a better illustration for this quote than Tawfiq al-Hakim's novel ‘Awdat al-Ruh (The Return of the Spirit). Published in 1933, ‘Awdat al-Ruh is the coming-of-age story of a young adolescent from a landowning family. Sent to Cairo to finish his high school studies, by the end of the narrative Muhsin is a young man involved in the 1919 revolution. Articulating the revolution as the rebirth of a nation, the novel insists on both the unity and the pharaonic roots of the Egyptian people. According to a well-known anecdote, Nasser repeatedly declared that ‘Awdat al-Ruh was his favourite bedtime reading, one that nourished his ideological consciousness and inspired his political journey (Hafiz 2001: 775). The influence of al-Hakim's text on Nasser was such that he named the hero of the only novel he wrote, Fi Sabil al-Hurriyya (For the Sake of Freedom), after ‘Awdat al-Ruh's Muhsin. Nasser's confession attests to the durable influence of al-Hakim's novel on the Egyptian imaginary, particularly that of its elites. Several generations of scholars have further underlined the importance of ‘Awdat al-Ruh as a text that literally wrote the nation into being and ‘contributed to shape what Benedict Anderson calls the National Imaginary’ (Hafiz 2001: 775).

In this chapter, I analyse the novel's articulation of the 1919 revolution and its reception, along with that of Naguib Mahfouz’ Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk, 1956). I argue that these two canonical novels have been central in shaping the dominant narrative about 1919. Both glorify 1919 as a major step towards the creation of a modern Egyptian nation. Rather than a chaotic disruptive revolutionary moment, 1919 is presented as a key moment for the upper middle-class elites to achieve their nation building project. Following Kirstin Ross in her work about May 1968 in France, I show that this is achieved by a set of ‘dominant narrative configurations– mostly reductions or circumscriptions of the event– adopted by the official story’: a ‘temporal reduction’ which produces ‘an abbreviated chronology’ and a ‘geographic reduction’(Ross 2002: 8–9).