Any discussion on modern identities needs to recognize that most people/nations/state incorporate multiple, overlapping sources of identity, and their understanding of these sources of identity are fluid, subject to change over time and depending on circumstances, and will often differ in ways from others belonging to the same category (even in this thread it seems to me that some are thinking of Arabism in racial terms, some in cultural terms, and some in political terms). It’s not at all impossible, but it seems unlikely to me that Salah is one of those Egyptians who explicitly rejects the Arab component of modern Egyptian identity.
One hundred years ago it would have been rare to find anyone thinking of Egypt or Egyptians in terms of an Arab identity. Western scholars, accustomed at that time to thinking in racial terms, tended to speak of “Arabs” in terms of what they viewed as the “pure-blooded” tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and their brethren in greater Syria and Iraq. With the growth of Arab nationalism from the late 19th c., the idea had been transformed among the peoples of the region from signifying the Bedouin and fellahin (peasantry) into an elitist political identity embracing all the Arabic speakers of those same lands (it was of course rejected by some of those Arabic speakers, most notably the Maronites of Mount Lebanon).
However during the interwar years the idea underwent change. Influenced by the apparent success of German and Italian nation-building, the theorist of pan-Arab nationalism Sati al-Husri proposed a much broader definition based on language and history, arguing that “Every Arab-speaking people is an Arab people. Every individual belonging to one of these Arabic-speaking peoples is an Arab.” The proposed pan-Arab state would thus spread from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.
In these years this idea began to impact in Egypt as greater connectivity with her neighbors and the internationalization of the Palestine question increasingly persuaded Egyptian people that they shared a common heritage and destiny with other Arabic-speaking peoples. As a result, Egypt was a founding member of the Arab League in 1945. Throughout, however, a distinct Egyptian identity remained, drawing primarily on Egypt’s pre-Arab/pre-Islamic Pharaonic heritage, and especially attracted members of the Coptic community but also secular intellectuals.
Following the Free Officers Revolution of 1952, President Nasser’s ideological manifesto The Philosophy of the Revolution placed Egypt in three overlapping circles of international activity - the Arab, the Islamic, and the African circles. He stressed that the Arab circle had the priority, and the years during which he ruled mark the high point of Egypt’s identification with Arabism, represented most explicitly by its union with Syria as the United Arab Republic (1958-61), a name which Egypt kept even after the collapse of that state (changed to the Arab Republic of Egypt in 1971).
Following the defeat of 1967, pan-Arabism lost much of its prestige, and Sadat’s reign in the 70s was marked by a turn inward, culminating in Egypt’s separate peace with Israel and expulsion from the Arab League throughout the 80s. Yet by then the Arab component of Egyptian identity was firmly rooted, and remains to this day, co-existing with various degrees of tension alongside a more particular Egyptian national component (attractive to Copts in particular) and a much broader Islamic component (excluding Copts by definition).