Nasser

Hero of the Arab Nation

Joel Gordon

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742007

To cite an old Egyptian cliche, Nasser (1918-1970) was the 'first Egyptian to rule Egypt since Cleopatra.' Deposing the corrupt king Farouk, abolishing the monarchy and negotiating the withdrawal of the British, Nasser was truly beloved by millions. Even after catastrophic military disaster in the 'Six-Day War' of 1967, having resigned in humiliation, such was his standing that people filled the streets to clamour for his reinstatement. In this captivating profile, Joel Gordon examines the legacy of the famous autocrat, being careful to include his limitations as well as his many strengths.

WE’RE THE PEOPLE: 1918–1956

We are your life and your smiles and you are our life,

We’ll rejoice and you’ll exult in our joy.

All that we extol, your heart will amplify our affection,

For we’ve chosen you and will march behind you,

The chief with the heart of gold, who has opened the gateways of freedom.

[Ihna al-sha`b (We’re the People), 1956]

Ihna al-sha`b, performed by Abd al-Halim Hafiz at Nasser’s inauguration on 24 June 1956 as Egypt’s first elected president, is the first great anthem of the Nasser era. In the weeks and months after the Free Officers’ take-over, almost all Egypt’s poets and composers collaborated to produce patriotic songs extolling the virtues of what quickly became known as the “new era,” well before the rebels had determined the extent of their political aspirations. For nearly four years, the political future remained uncertain. The young officers who had so boldly inserted themselves into the political arena, to inspire and, if need be, command reform, soon resolved that they alone could – and should – guarantee the revitalization of democracy. However, the old order, though dispirited and discredited, did not die easily. Other reformist agendas, some moderate, some more radical, contested the right to shape Egypt’s future. Consequently, the Free Officers found themselves compelled – some took to it more easily than others – to use martial force to insure that their evolving vision and their movement would persist. A crucial component of their reinvention of the state was the emergence of a bona fide leader to capture popular sympathy, a man who could and would stand above the collective and personify the nation.

Gamal Abd al-Nasser had been the driving force behind the Free Officers and he remained the most influential voice after 23 July 1952 in the new general command that ran the country. His imprint on the direction of what became the July Revolution is clear. Yet his emergence into the limelight, the headlines, was deliberate and his love affair with the masses slow to develop. Partly this was political sensibility; the country cried out for a reprieve from the politics of personality and was not ready to declare allegiance to an unknown, thirty-four-year-old colonel. Partly it was also disposition. Nasser had led the clandestine military movement from its inception but few in the organization even knew him as their leader. He was neither orator nor propagandist. Like his closest colleagues, he exuded great personal charm but his was a quiet passion. For three years after their take-over Nasser led from the shadows, working within a joint revolutionary command behind a figurehead leader. By 1955, however, his position both within the junta and in the public gaze was uncontested and his public persona, initially hard-edged, had begun to soften. By early 1956, he had become inextricable from Egyptian national, regional and international aspirations. His first uncontested election followed which, by formally legitimizing his authority, officially ended his long journey from the wings, on to center stage and into the hearts of the masses.

MODEST BEGINNINGS

Nasser was born on 15 January 1918, in Balos, a suburb of Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city. Like Anwar al-Sadat, his comrade-in-arms and eventual successor, Nasser would expand his rural roots into a key component of his native identity. Early biographies are replete with references to his sa`idi (Upper Egyptian) roots, a family tradition tracing his tribal lineage to Arabia and his indomitable character traits – inner fortitude, manliness, group solidarity, generosity and openness. Yet Nasser, like Sadat, was really a city boy. Many biographers note that he spent holidays in Bani Murr, his father’s hometown, 250 miles from Cairo, which must have had a population of several thousand. To one biographer, Nasser admitted years later that he never visited his ancestral village until he was twenty, presumably when as a young cadet he took his first post at a nearby base.

If he was not truly a rural-born son of the soil, his paternal family origins were certainly rooted in the earth and his background far more modest than those of the social and political élite whom he would displace. Husayn Khalil, his paternal grandfather, who reputedly lived to the age of 107, was a peasant, although as the owner of five feddans (one feddan is roughly one acre) was hardly dirt poor. Two of Husayn’s six sons, Abd al-Nasser and Khalil, left the village to be educated, took employment in the state bureaucracy and never looked back. Abd al-Nasser Husayn (1888–1968), Gamal’s father, attended the kuttab (Qur’an school) in Bani Murr; later he was sent to Assiut, to attend a high school run by American Presbyterian missionaries. As a student in the provincial capital – Assiut at the time had a population of 30,000 – Nasser’s father traded his gallabiyya (ankle-length gown) and taqiyya (skullcap) for a school uniform and tarbush (fez), the headgear of the modern middle class. As he worked his way up the civil service, Abd al-Nasser proudly maintained his new urban outfit; even after his son’s revolution swept the tarbush from people’s heads – not by decree but symbolic distancing from what many perceived to be a sartorial artifact of the old regime – the old man refused to abandon this mark of status.

After graduating from secondary school, Nasser’s father entered the civil service. He found employment in Alexandria in the postal administration. In 1917 he married Fahima Hammad, the daughter of an Alexandria coal merchant, also with Upper Egyptian roots. Fahima, who was fifteen years his junior and financially secure, bore their first child, Gamal, within the year. When Nasser was three, his father was transferred to Assiut. It is difficult to imagine the family not visiting Bani Murr, although Gamal’s recollections were hazy at best. Four years later, Abd al-Nasser was transferred to a village near Suez, in the Canal Zone. He surely sought more for his son than a rural education. Gamal, therefore, was sent to Cairo, to live with his paternal uncle, Khalil. With financial assistance from his father, seven-year-old Gamal entered the Nahhasin primary school in the heart of Cairo’s bustling, medieval Khan al-Khalili district.

Separation from his family, which now included three younger brothers, probably deeply affected the young Nasser. Gamal corresponded with his mother, who he saw only during holidays. In the spring of 1926, her letters suddenly stopped. The family told Gamal his mother had taken ill and gone to stay with his grandmother in Alexandria. When he arrived home on a holiday trip, the eight-year-old learned that his mother had died. It was, as he recalled years later, “a cruel blow that was imprinted indelibly on my mind.”² Less than two years later his father remarried; in 1929, upon a posting to Alexandria, he summoned the eleven-year-old Gamal to rejoin the family. Ethnographers insist that remarriage was not uncommon for men in Abd al-Nasser Husayn’s position but Gamal never felt close to his stepmother and a barrier had risen between father and son that would never really be broken. Gamal started high school in Ras al-Tin, not far from one of the two royal seaside palaces. Four years later, in 1933, the family relocated again, when his father was appointed as postmaster in Cairo’s working class Qurunfush district, between the medieval city and the modern district of Abbasiya, where many of Egypt’s new army officers would soon take up residence. The family lived in a traditional neighborhood, Khamis al-Ads, in a flat rented from a Jewish neighbor and next to a Kairite synagogue. Gamal attended the Nahda school but only just passed his exams. It was not due to lack of intelligence – “Gamal had plenty of that” – but rather to “an ingrained tendency to play truant, coupled with an early penchant for meddling in politics.”³ As for many of his contemporaries, formal schooling had become less important than the lessons of the street.

In high school, first in Alexandria, then in Cairo, Gamal began his political education. Nasser’s generation came of age in the tumultuous thirties, the second decade of Egypt’s faltering parliamentary experiment. The men who would ultimately overthrow the “liberal order” were born around the time of the 1919 revolution against British rule. Too young to remember it, they were raised with stories both of its glories and, increasingly, resentment towards its failings. Disillusion, staining the optimism of youth that drew them into the streets, would eventually turn them into soldiers committed to fostering their own revolution against those who had failed the nation.

FALSE HOPES

For many Egyptians, the 1919 revolution is still the crowning moment of Egyptian nationalist historiography. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, ostensibly protecting European financial investments by ousting a reckless nationalist government, returning proper authority to the Ottoman-appointed khedive (viceroy) and reasserting foreign control over Egypt’s economy. At first simply intending to restore order and leave, British politicians quickly determined their forces needed to stay for the long haul. Egypt remained an Ottoman realm, albeit dominated by the British agent and consul general, until the outbreak of World War One. When the Young Turk government in Constantinople allied with the Central Powers, Britain unilaterally declared Egypt a protectorate, its khedive the sultan (and the British agent and consul general the high commissioner). After the war Egyptian nationalist leaders formed a Wafd (delegation) to petition the high commissioner for permission to present their demands at the Paris peace conference. When Sir Reginald Wingate ordered Wafdist leaders to be arrested and deported, the country erupted. Demonstrations and acts of sabotage against colonial outposts broke out in all sections of the population, as Egyptians transcended religious, class and gender boundaries to speak on behalf of a unified nation. In 1922, Sir Edmund Allenby, the man who had marched through Jerusalem to liberate Syria from Ottoman rule during the Great War, set in motion the processes for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy that would be independent, save for a series of British “reservations.”

Born of popular uprising but assisted by colonial overlords, the new liberal order faced insurmountable obstacles. The 1923 constitution granted supreme power to the monarch – the sultan had become a king – who could dismiss parliament at his royal whim. Egypt’s two kings, Fuad (reigned 1923–1936) and Farouk (reigned 1936–52) ultimately served British masters. Britain reserved the right to sovereign authority with regard to imperial defenses, communications, the Sudan and the rights of non-Muslim minorities and foreign interests. For the nationalists, the rallying cries became “total independence” from Britain and greater legislative and executive power from the monarchy. The Wafd, re-invented as a formal political party, could win an electoral majority but would only be allowed to form a government when it suited British or royal interests; this usually occurred when the Wafd, having been banned from or boycotted an election, mustered enough force in the streets to make its banishment from power untenable. A vicious cycle began in 1924, following the first democratically-held elections. In November 1924, after only eleven months of rule, Prime Minister Sa`d Zaghlul, the Wafd leader and hero of 1919, resigned in the face of British gunboat diplomacy following the assassination, by radical nationalists, of Sir Lee Stack, the British Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army and Governor-General of the Sudan. A series of minority governments followed, led by palace-appointed chief ministers, some sincere nationalists but all willing to collaborate with anti-liberal elements. Nasser would remember Zaghlul’s death, when he was just nine years old; the outpouring of grief and the lingering resentment at his enforced expulsion from power.

By the early 1930s, Egypt’s troubled parliamentary order faced a far graver crisis. The Wafd had formed only three governments – in 1924, 1928 and 1930 – and none had lasted more than a year. In 1930, the King appointed an autocratic loyalist, Ismail Sidqi, to head a minority coalition. Sidqi promptly abrogated the 1923 constitution and replaced it with a new charter that granted even greater authority to the crown. Demonstrations, of a kind not seen since 1919, erupted. Wafd partisans and minority parties battled in the streets. New forces, not directly affiliated with the parties but clearly linked to a growing sense of popular antipathy to establishment organizations, began to assert their authority, including the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, and the ultra-nationalist youth movement, Young Egypt, founded in 1933. Faced with mounting opposition, Sidqi’s government collapsed in 1933. A new minority coalition restored the 1923 constitution but the King and his British backers acceded to popular demand and called for elections.

In 1936 the Wafd regained power and, with global war on the horizon, renegotiated the Anglo-Egyptian relationship. The treaty, approved by both governments, officially ended the occupation. Britain recognized Egyptian independence, agreed to an exchange of ambassadors and supported Egypt’s membership of the League of Nations. Egypt agreed to allow Britain to maintain a 10,000-man military force in the Suez Canal Zone and bound itself to ally with Britain in case of war. Britain reserved the right to augment its military forces to safeguard Egypt from aggression and to reoccupy the country, should the need arise. The Montreux Convention of 1937, supported by Great Britain, approved a twelve-year phase-out of capitulations and mixed courts, extra-territorial privileges for foreign subjects that had been long decried by Egyptian nationalists. Two years later, the outbreak of World War Two would render Egyptian independence virtually meaningless but, for the moment at least, Egyptians could celebrate.

This was when Gamal Abd al-Nasser and his generation took their first political steps and threw their first projectiles at occupying forces and subservient Egyptian police. At the Ras al-Tin school in Alexandria, Gamal led the student movement. During his first demonstration he was struck in the face by a police baton and spent a night in jail. In November 1935, back in Cairo, he lost two friends to police gunfire and a bullet grazed his forehead. He was taken to the offices of an opposition newspaper to recover; the following day his name appeared in print as a wounded hero. At the time, he was drawn to the fiery rhetoric and martial spirit of Young Egypt. There is no indication that he joined the ranks of the green shirts, the mujahidin (fighters), but he may well have attended Young Egypt rallies, read the movement’s publications and contributed a few coins to its “piaster plan” to help finance local industrial projects.

If formal classroom learning did not capture young Gamal’s attention none the less, he had become an avid reader of literature and history. Nasser’s generation of middle class, upwardly mobile students read both European and new Arabic literature. Gamal read biographies of Churchill, Bismark and Ataturk and wrote a junior-year essay on Voltaire; he also read Egyptian nationalist poets and essayists such as Ahmad Shawqi and Mustafa Kamil, as well as the prose fiction of Tawfiq al-Hakim, such as Yawmiyat na’ib fil-aryaf (Diary of a Rural Prosecutor), a biting satire of bureaucratic ineptitude and corner-cutting and Awdat al-ruh (Return of the Spirit), the tale of a young boy who discovers the deep roots of Egypt’s civilization. Sometimes Egyptian nationalism trumped the Western masters: the bill for a high school production of Julius Casear, in which Nasser played the title role, championed the Roman dictator as the conqueror of Great Britain.

But what role to pursue? According to the 1936 treaty, the Egyptian military, formerly an arm of the British occupation, now served an independent state. The officer corps remained the province of the aristocracy, a “jigsaw puzzle of parade units, quasi-police forces and cavalry squadrons for polo-loving pasha’s sons.”⁴ Family ties counted and tuition fees for the academy were prohibitive. However, plans to rapidly enlarge the armed forces and a desperate need for junior officers created new opportunities. Middle class sons of Nasser’s generation answered that call. His applications to the military and police academies (he was decidedly less interested in the latter) were rejected, due to lack of connections and the record of his political activities. Gamal fell back on the university. He enrolled in the faculty of law but lasted only one term. Other future comrades fared equally badly; their minds were not set on academia. Persisting in his ambition to enter the military, Gamal managed (probably through his Uncle Khalil) to secure an interview with the Under-Secretary of State for War, who agreed to support his application. In March 1937, he began officer training, part of a cohort scheduled for an accelerated seventeen-month program.

NIGHTS AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

In the army Nasser found his calling. His grades were solid and his instructors recognized his leadership talents. Within six months he had been promoted and assigned as head of a study group. In July 1938, he passed his final exams and received his first posting, to Mankabad in Upper Egypt, not far from Assiut and Bani Murr. There, surrounded by fellow junior officers of like mind, the next phase of his life began. Anwar al-Sadat described Nasser as “a manly and straight-backed young officer … reserved and serious in manner” and impatient with chit-chat and he denoted Mankabad as the birthplace of the secret society that would become the Free Officers. Published recollections of long days on maneuvers and long nights of political discussions around the campfire blur the edges of cliché: “We were young men full of hope. We were brothers-in-arm, united in friendship and in a common detestation of the existing order of things” but are surely rooted in reality.⁵

In early 1939, Nasser requested, and was granted, a transfer to the Sudan. There, he met up with Abd al-Hakim Amr, one of his study group charges at the academy and they became great friends. In May 1940, Nasser was promoted to lieutenant and in late 1941, assigned to El Alamein, where he was reunited with Sadat. In September 1942, he was promoted to captain; six months later he was appointed as instructor in the staff college at Abbasiya, on the outskirts of Cairo. In 1944, he married Tahiya Kazim, the younger sister of a friend of his Uncle Khalil; her father owned a small rug factory in Abbasiya. Four years his junior, Tahiya was educated and financially secure, thanks to an inheritance. In 1946 their first child, Hoda, was born; another daughter, Mona, followed a year later. Tahiya quickly sensed her husband’s involvement in clandestine activities but even on the night of the Free Officers coup never realized his role as leader. Even when First Lady, she remained far from the spotlight, she rarely attended state functions and never exuded a sense of power or privilege.

Despite its formal independence, the Second World War accentuated Egypt’s subservience to its British masters. Young junior officers like Nasser, who had graduated between 1937 and 1939, grew increasingly frustrated. The treaty bound Egypt to ally with and support Britain but palace politicians, keenly observing the course of the war, prevaricated and hedged their bets. Rumors of royal connections with Axis agents proliferated. As Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced through Egypt and many in Alexandria and Cairo loudly welcomed liberation, British officials lost patience. On 4 February 1942, British tanks surrounded Cairo’s Abdin Palace and Britain’s ambassador threatened to depose the young King if he failed to appoint a Wafdist government. At the nervous urging of his key aides, Farouk reluctantly signed. The incident wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transliteration
• INTRODUCTION: BELOVED OF MILLIONS
• 1 WE’RE THE PEOPLE: 1918–1956
• 2 THE GREATER NATION: 1956–1961
• 3 THE SOCIALIST GARDEN: 1961–1967
• 4 RUINS: 1967–1970
• CONCLUSION: A PICTURE
• You live!
• Bibliographic essay
• Index