The soldiers gradually came to see their own commanding officers and not the enemy they were fighting as the "other." How does the nationalist discourse explain the fact that the Egyptian soldiers resisted serving in the army, allegedly the national institution, or that they saw their own officers and not the Ottoman army as the other?

XREF: Connects to loc 1336: Egyptian officers were closer to their Ottoman enemies than their own troops — officers themselves were ethnically alien to fellahin conscripts.

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 1670