Book Review: Il Kwang Sung, Mamluks in the Modern Egyptian Mind: Changing the Memory of the Mamluks, 1919–1952

Il Kwang Sung wrote a fascinating work. Written in a lucid and accessible style, and grounded in a rich and interdisciplinary archive, Sung’s work explores the ways in which modern Egyptians imagined the Mamluk past before the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir) to power. The book convincingly argues that there was no one, stable, memory of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mamluks in Ottoman Egypt. Rather, different groups of politicians, intellectuals, and writers presented their own versions of the Mamluks in Egypt