The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  THE NASSERIST PHENOMENON

  The 1948 war and the ease with which the Arab armies were defeated exposed the malaise of the Arab political order. In that war, an emergent, fundamentally European and colonial society struggling for its life and survival was pitted against an array of feudal monarchies with fragile domestic roots and little popular legitimacy. For the Arab side, the war was not so much a matter of life and death as a sideshow, an adventure, a chance to entertain illusions of grandeur and revive memories of old conquests. But, as it turned out, 1948 did become a matter of life and death for many of the Arab leaders involved, as their defeated armies, one after another, avenged their loss by turning against leaders seen as incompetent and corrupt, belonging to an era whose time had long passed.

  Arab nationalism now assumed a new manifestation, articulated by young, restless Arabs yearning to emerge out of the shadows of their defeated leaders. This generation of Arabs was motivated not only by the shame of military defeat but also by a sense of solidarity with their Palestinian brethren, now scattered in refugee camps throughout the region. This post-1948 nationalism had three principal features. First, it was closely equated with “modernity,” seeking to rid itself of archaic, feudal traditions. Second, it was militaristic, seeing military might and discipline as immediate remedies for the defeat. Third, it saw strength in numbers, assuming that with unity the Arabs would become a force hard to defeat. Each of these strands was personified in Gamal Abdel Nasser, who from the mid-1950s until he was himself defeated by Israel in 1967 came to embody much of Arab nationalism.

  At around the same time that Nasser was reaching the pinnacle of his popularity, a rich literature was beginning to emerge from various Arab nationalist intellectuals, some of the more notable of whom were the Egyptian Taha Hussein, the Yemeni Sati al-Husri, and the Syrian Michel Aflaq.65 Nasser’s nationalism, of course, was practical and political, not literary or intellectual. He was a soldier, a politician, a political animal in every sense of the word. His astounding appeal among the masses—his success in presenting himself to the peoples of Egypt and other Arab states as their hope and their savior—came from tapping into nationalist forces that had long been dormant and were desperate to be released. Increasingly, for a time at least, the question of Palestine, the catalyst for the emergence of this latest phase of Arab nationalism, was pushed into the background. It became fodder for the rhetoric of nationalism, but the actual focus and substance of that nationalism was Egypt and its president, Nasser.

  Gamal Abdel Nasser was born in Alexandria on January 15, 1918. His generation came of age at a time of profound political instability, corresponding with historic developments occurring not only in Palestine but also much closer to home, in Egypt itself. The Egyptian monarchy, under the incompetent and corrupt leadership of King Farouq, presided over a country that was only nominally independent, with Britain maintaining a heavy-handed presence in Egypt’s economic and political life. Political chaos was the order of the day, with various groups often agitating against the monarch, the British, or, more commonly, both. Perhaps the most important was the Wafd Party, formed after World War I by a group of wealthy Egyptian landowners and industrialists. The Wafd emerged as an especially important player in Egyptian politics in the final years of the monarchy, but after 1952 it withered away and did not reemerge until the late 1970s. Even more instrumental in the collapse of the monarchy was the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Muslimeen), established in 1928, an ardent advocate of the need for greater social morality and full independence from Britain. Beginning in 1933, a group calling itself the Young Egypt Society (Misr al-Fatat) was also formed. Made up mostly of students at Cairo University’s Law Faculty and seeking to imitate the example of European fascists, the society’s adherents called themselves the Greenshirts and often clashed with Wafdist Blueshirts. Organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt Society were essentially nationalist and populist, and although they seldom had a coherent platform or ideology of their own they were united in disliking the ruling elite, deploring its military and political incompetence, and wishing to reverse the general malaise that gripped Egyptian and the larger Arab social and political life. By the mid-1930s, both groups had penetrated the Egyptian army and were beginning to attract followers among the officer corps.66 More importantly, their efforts had helped create a political atmosphere highly charged against both the monarchy and the British. It was in this context that Nasser entered the Military Academy in 1937 and, from there, rose relatively quickly through the ranks of the army. By 1952, he had become a lieutenant colonel.67

  It did not take long for Nasser to become politically active. The early to mid-1940s were especially traumatic for Egyptians and for the larger Arab world in general, culminating in the 1948 war. In 1942, for example, the British had humiliated King Farouq by surrounding his palace with tanks and ordering him to appoint as prime minister a politician of their choosing. Soon after returning from the Palestine war, in late 1949 Nasser organized a secret military cell, called the Free Officers, with the specific aim of capturing political power. Nasser’s own words are revealing: “We were fighting in Palestine but our dreams were in Egypt. Our bullets were aimed at the enemy lurking in the trenches in front of us, but our hearts were hovering around our distant Mother Country, which was then prey to the wolves that ravaged it.”68

  The group, which by the early 1950s numbered into the hundreds, was made up mostly of younger, junior officers, many drawn from the Military Academy itself, where Nasser had become an instructor. Although void of a “philosophy” per se, the cabal was united around certain key principles: getting rid of the king and his clique, putting an end to British imperialism, and using the armed forces to achieve national objectives. The years 1950 through 1952 were especially tense, characterized by frequent assassinations of political figures and sporadic violence. Finally, in the early morning hours of July 23, 1952, the Free Officers staged a relatively bloodless and swift takeover of the state. The government was overthrown and replaced by a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), made up of the nucleus of the Free Officers movement. Within days, King Farouq was forced to abdicate. A new order was proclaimed; the revolution had begun.

  Too young to be assured of their own credibility before the Egyptian people, in September members of the RCC asked an older, popular army general, Muhammad Naguib, to serve as the prime minister. The following January all political parties were outlawed and a three-year “transition period” was declared, during which the RCC was to rule and to facilitate the country’s revolution. Nasser wrote that year (1953) that “political revolution demands, for its success, the unity of all national elements, their fusion and mutual support, as well as self-denial for the sake of the country as a whole.”69 In June Egypt was proclaimed a republic and Naguib became its first president, still retaining the office of the prime minister. But the president’s star did not shine for long, and he soon fell victim to Nasser’s machinations in the RCC. In February 1954, the RCC branded Naguib a traitor and ousted him. A month earlier, the RCC had banned the Muslim Brotherhood and had suppressed pro-Naguib elements within the army and among street demonstrators. Naguib was brought back temporarily, now only as president and with much-reduced powers, but within a few months he was accused of complicity in a plot to assassinate Nasser and was removed from office again, this time for good. By 1956, Nasser had clearly emerged as the dominant figure within the RCC, having a year earlier represented Egypt at the Non-Aligned Summit in Bandung, Indonesia, where he had been hailed as the leader of Egypt and the Arab world. In a referendum held in June 1956, a new constitution was inaugurated, based on which the RCC was formally abolished and Nasser was elected to the presidency. Within months, the president was to reach the pinnacle of his power and popularity because of the Suez Canal crisis.

  Before discussing the Suez Canal crisis and its consequences, a word needs to be said about Nasser’s march from relative obscurity in the late 1940s to the
height of power by the mid-1950s. In The Philosophy of the Revolution, which he wrote in 1953 and published the following year, Nasser admitted that the transformation of his military coup to a full-blown revolution was a matter more of necessity than of advanced planning. “After July 23rd I was shocked by the reality. The vanguard had performed its task,” he wrote, referring to the military. “It stormed the walls of the fort of tyranny; it forced Farouk to abdicate and stood by expecting the mass formations to arrive at their ultimate object. . . . A dismal picture, horrible and threatening, then presented itself. I felt my heart charged with sorrow and dripping with bitterness. The mission of the vanguard had not ended. In fact it was just beginning at that very hour. We needed discipline but found chaos behind our lines. We needed unity but found dissensions. We needed action but found nothing but surrender and idleness.”70 For all his efforts behind the scenes, first among the Free Officers and then within the RCC, initially Nasser was neither generally liked by the Egyptians nor trusted very much. In fact, many feared him, and, as the brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and other dissidents showed, they did so for good reason.71 But once the popular Naguib was out of the picture, it was Nasser’s turn to shine, and this he did by two primary means: his foreign policy, and his populist domestic social and political programs.

  In domestic politics, Nasser knew the language of the street, having himself risen from a modest middle-class background. His rhetoric was electrifying, his charismatic personality magnetic, his message simple and compelling. Following an alleged attempt on his life by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Alexandria on October 26, 1954, Nasser, unscathed, climbed to the podium and delivered a rousing speech: “My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake, die for the sake of your freedom and honor. Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser.”72 This was a far cry from the image the average Egyptian had come to have of King Farouq or, especially, British officials. Nasser’s charisma was backed by a series of highly popular social policies, chief among which was the Agrarian Reform Law, enacted by the RCC in September 1952 within weeks of his coming to power.73 Another project in which Nasser was personally involved from the earliest days, the construction of the High Aswan Dam, was also a matter of national pride and a highly emotional issue for all Egyptians. To present a forum for the participation of the masses, in 1953 a Liberation Rally organization was formed, with Nasser as its secretary-general. All other parties were banned shortly thereafter. In 1956 a new constitution was promulgated, and the Liberation Rally changed to a new party, the National Union (NU). In 1962, when under the aegis of a Socialist Charter the regime formally adopted socialism as the most desirable path for social transformation, the NU was changed to the Arab Socialist Union (ASU).

  Figure 7. Egyptian women celebrating Nasser’s announcement of women’s right to vote, 1956. Corbis.

  While the ASU’s elaborate organizational structure ensured mass participation in the political process, the repressive apparatus of the state was never far from sight. The army and the security services, the dreaded mukhaberat, became omnipresent. They struck fear into the hearts of Nasser’s potential opponents and helped keep intact the mystiques of total power and popular adulation.

  All these domestic accomplishments aside, it was in the foreign policy domain, and largely because of it, that Nasser emerged as a larger-than-life figure. Like that of his contemporaries, Nasser’s leadership was crystallizing at a time of intense military and diplomatic competition between the communist bloc and the West. To survive against domestic adversaries and potential challenges from abroad, all Middle Eastern leaders at the time—from the shah of Iran to the generals ruling in Turkey and King Hussein of Jordan, as well as the fledgling monarchies of the Arabian peninsula—had cast their lot with the West. This was represented initially by Britain’s extensive involvement in the region, and, later, beginning in the 1950s, by that of the United States. Whatever the actual wisdom of such alliances, the peoples of the Middle East often saw their leaders as Western puppets, lackeys installed by imperialism to do its dirty work. Partly out of conviction and partly to cement his populist image, Nasser became one of the main figures within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), espousing a policy of “positive neutralism” that, in theory at least, was meant to favor neither the Eastern bloc nor the West.74 In the 1955 NAM Summit Nasser was seen as the spokesman of the Arab world and, in league with the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and Josip Tito, its primary advocate and protector against the global forces of colonial domination.

  Nasser’s actual confrontation with the West was not long in coming. For some time, Egypt’s foreign policy had featured four specific goals: securing financial support for building the Aswan Dam; acquiring military hardware for its army; wresting control of the Suez Canal from British and French commercial interests; and clarifying the status of Sudan regarding its independence or unification with Egypt. Of these, the Sudan issue was resolved the earliest, in 1953, when the country was given the option of deciding its fate on its own through a referendum. In 1954, Sudan unilaterally declared independence.

  The three remaining objectives became points of contention and, soon thereafter, conflict. In summer 1956, the United States offered Egypt financial aid for the Aswan Dam project. In an apparent move to humiliate Nasser, however, once the Egyptian president accepted the aid offer, it was withdrawn. In retaliation, Nasser nationalized the British-owned Suez Canal Company in July and proceeded to secure massive economic and military assistance from the Soviet bloc. With tensions at an all-time high, Israel invaded Egypt on October 29, 1956, ostensibly in retaliation for frequent raids into Israel from Egyptian territory by Palestinian fighters called the Fedayeen. The following day Britain and France warned the belligerents to cease fire; Egypt’s refusal to do so was followed by British bombing of Port Said at the mouth of the Suez and the landing of French and British troops in the Canal Zone on October 31.

  For different reasons, each of the invading countries wanted to see Nasser toppled. For Britain and France, Nasser’s incendiary advocacy of Third World liberation had to be stopped before independence struggles like the ones in India and Algeria had a chance to spread elsewhere. France was especially troubled by Nasser’s generous support for the National Liberation Front in Algeria, which was directing the fight against French rule from Cairo. Israel, of course, had its own reasons to see Nasser overthrown, as his seemed the most credible and immediate threat to Israeli national security.

  Ironically, it was the United States that came to Nasser’s rescue, pressing the invaders both directly and through the United Nations to withdraw from Egyptian territory. This was, of course, motivated less by the American policy makers’ love for Nasser than by their concerns over the reemergence of British and French military ascendancy in the region. A UN Emergency Force (UNEF) was set up to supervise the evacuation of foreign troops from Egypt and, once the evacuation was complete, to stand guard at the Egyptian-Israeli border. By late December 1956, the last of British and French troops left Egyptian territory, and, with great reluctance, Israel finally withdrew on March 9, 1957.

  The Suez invasion was a military disaster for Egypt, exposing the shocking ease with which Israeli forces overran Egypt’s defenses and occupied much of the Sinai and the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip.75 In fact, fearing more losses, Nasser had ordered his forces to retreat to save them from further British and French attacks. The Egyptian air force nevertheless inflicted some casualties on Israeli forces, and the invaders met with surprisingly heavy resistance in Port Said and other towns in the Sinai.

  Figure 8. Egyptian boys and girls receiving military training during the Suez Canal crisis, 1956. Corbis.

  Once the dust of the invasion settled and the invaders had been forced to withdraw under international condemnation and pressure, Nasser turned is military
defeat into a great diplomatic and moral victory. Such a victory, however imaginary, was just what an increasingly dictatorial, charismatic leader like Nasser needed. “I have declared in your name that we shall fight and not surrender,” he told masses of adoring Egyptians after the crisis, “that we shall not live a dishonorable life however long they persist in their aggressive plans.”76 With his domestic enemies and potential rivals eliminated, Nasser could now delay delivering the promises of the 1952 revolution by pointing to his struggle against “Western imperialism.” Not surprisingly, after 1956 the regime turned its attention increasingly to foreign affairs, and, consequently, Nasser directed his rhetoric to an audience beyond Egypt’s borders. It was then that the phenomenon of Pan-Arabism—the process whereby the Arab nation sought to transcend artificial, colonially drawn borders and to become one—moved beyond the realm of academia and intellectual fancy and into the realm of diplomacy and practice. And Nasser, the one Arab leader who had stared down imperialism until the latter blinked, became its chief articulator and protagonist.

  For a people defeated and humiliated, for those receptive to the idea of a liberator, for the peoples of the Middle East whose leaders seemed remote and uncaring, Nasser was a hero. His fiery speeches, broadcast by Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs, were listened to as far away as Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. As with most other populist leaders, his popularity was at times greater outside Egypt than in his own country. The Egyptians feared and admired him; elsewhere in the Arab world, for the most part, he was lionized and idolized. He soon became the liberator the Palestinians never had, the voice the Arabs had yearned for, the military strongman that the times seemed to call for. Before long, in 1958, one of the most concrete steps toward Pan-Arab unity was taken when Syria and Egypt joined to form the United Arab Republic, with Nasser as its president. Arab intellectuals celebrated the birth of the UAR as a powerful synthesis of Pan-Arab ideals, and leaders elsewhere—in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya especially—sought to forge similar alliances so as not to be left behind. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pan-Arabism was in full swing.