Greatly influenced by the French philosopher Ernest Renan who argued that what defined a nation was "Le désir d'être ensemble" ("a will to live together"), Kamil maintained that the Egyptians had for millennia had wanted to live together in a single state.[9] Kamil's argument that the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around about 3100 BC was the birth of Egypt as a state based his sense of Egyptian nationalism on loyalty to Egypt as a state and geographic entity, and contradicted the standard Islamic teaching that all of Egypt's history prior to the Muslim conquest of 639-642 AD was a period of jahiliyyah ("barbarous ignorance").[9] Like many other Egyptian nationalists of the 19th century, Kamil took great pride in the discoveries of archaeologists who uncovered the ruins of ancient Egypt, and he presented Egyptian history from the time of the Pharaohs to the present as one that all Egyptians should be proud of.[9] Somewhat misunderstanding Mohammad Ali the Great's intentions, Kamil claimed that Mohammad Ali had only restored Egypt back to its status as a great power, which originated with the days of the Pharaohs.[9] Proud of his fallah (peasant) origins, Kamil saw himself as an Egyptian first and a subject of the Ottoman empire a distant second.[9] Kamil's position on the role of Islam in Egyptian life was quite elastic as at various times depending on his audience he asserted that Islam was the cornerstone of Egyptian national identity and at other times asserted that it was love of al-watan which defined being Egyptian, a position that implicitly accepted the Copts and Egyptian Jews as equals of the Muslims.[10] Kamil tended to see Egyptian wataniya (patriotism) as being boosted by Islam instead of being based on Islam.[11] Through Kamil was not willing to reject publicly the pan-Islamic message of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II aka "Abdul Hamid the Damned", his writings tended to imply that the Muslims of the Egyptian al-watan had more in common with each other than they did with Muslims from other lands, and Islam was presented by him more as a means for unifying the Egyptian people than the end.[9] Kamil supported Abdul Hamid's pan-Islamic campaign as the best way of bringing the Ottoman empire onto Egypt's side, hoping that the Sultan might persuade the British to leave Egypt, but he did not want Egypt to be occupied by the Ottomans again.[12]