Gamal Abdel Nasser

Gamal Abdel Nasser: The Voice That Conquered the Arab World

On 26 October 1954, in Alexandria, a Muslim Brotherhood member named Mahmoud Abdel-Latif fired eight shots at Egypt's prime minister during a live radio broadcast. Every one missed. Nasser did not stop speaking. "My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt," he told the microphone, "each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser." Within weeks the Brotherhood was being dismantled and a colonel who two years earlier had run a coup in civilian clothes was master of Egypt.

The Postal Clerk's Son

He was born on 15 January 1918 in Alexandria, son of Abdel Nasser Hussein, a postal worker from Upper Egypt. His mother, Fahima Hammad, died in childbirth in 1926, when he was eight: "losing her this way was a shock so deep that time failed to remedy." His father's transfers moved the boy between schools across Egypt, and politics found him early: in 1935 he led a student demonstration against British policy, was grazed by a police bullet, and earned his first press mention.

That record initially cost him a place at the Royal Military Academy; after a spell in law school and a sponsor's intervention he was admitted in late 1937 and commissioned in July 1938, forming there the friendships — with Abdel Hakim Amer and Anwar Sadat — that would define Egyptian politics for three decades. He read the nationalists Mustafa Kamel and Ahmed Shawqi, and credited Tawfiq al-Hakim's novel *Return of the Spirit*, with its leader embodying a people's collective longing, as his direct inspiration for revolution.

Faluja

Combat came in Palestine in 1948. Wounded in July, Nasser became deputy commander of the force holding the Faluja pocket — encircled, shelled continuously, cut off from its own command and unsupported by Jordan. The brigade refused to surrender, and its defenders, as the journalist Eric Margolis recorded, "became national heroes." Nasser used the siege to write *Philosophy of the Revolution*.

He came home convinced the enemy was in Cairo, not Tel Aviv. Teaching again at the academy, he built a clandestine network that by 1949 called itself the Association of Free Officers, drawing on Young Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists around a programme of almost nothing but "freedom and the restoration of their country's dignity." By 1950 it numbered ninety officers, and Nasser alone knew the whole structure.

Twenty-Three July

On 22 July 1952 the Free Officers seized government buildings, radio stations and army headquarters; by the 23rd it was done. Nasser watched from Cairo in civilian clothes, having notified Washington and London two days earlier and secured their agreement not to prop up King Farouk. Judging Egypt would not accept a junior officer, he installed General Mohamed Naguib as figurehead chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. The monarchy fell on 18 June 1953.

The partnership broke over how far to go. Nasser wanted agrarian reform and the abolition of political parties; Naguib did not. When Naguib offered his resignation in February 1954, Nasser accepted it, put him under house arrest and took both the chairmanship and the premiership; mutinies for Naguib were crushed in two days. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1953 — capping estates and redistributing land — was, in Nasser's own reading, what turned a coup into a revolution. A referendum made him president in June 1956, on results the historian Kirk J. Beatie judges "likely falsified"; its constitution installed single-party rule but granted women the vote and barred sex discrimination.

The Canal

On 19 July 1956 the United States and Britain withdrew financing for the Aswan High Dam. Nasser learned of it from a news wire flying home from Belgrade, and within four days had his answer. On 26 July, in Alexandria, he nationalised the Suez Canal Company — British-French owned since 1869 — promising compensation, denouncing British imperialism, and reminding his audience that 120,000 Egyptians had died digging it. The American ambassador Henry Byroade cabled that he could not overemphasise the move's popularity "even among Nasser's enemies."

Britain, France and Israel answered with a secretly coordinated war. Israel crossed Sinai on 29 October; Anglo-French aircraft bombed Egyptian airfields on the 31st. Militarily Egypt lost badly — some 2,000 soldiers killed, 5,000 captured, up to 1,000 dead fighting in the streets of Port Said. Politically Nasser won outright. As the US State Department's own history records, Eisenhower forced his allies to accept a UN ceasefire on 6 November and publicly condemned the invasion; the British and French were gone by December, the Israelis by March 1957. The diplomat Anthony Nutting concluded the crisis "established Nasser finally and completely." It had another side: new residency rules drove out foreign nationals, and roughly 25,000 Jews — nearly half the community — left Egypt in 1956.

Conqueror by Radio

By 1957 pan-Arabism was the region's dominant creed and Nasser its undisputed leader. Adeed Dawisha credits his "charisma, bolstered by his perceived victory in the Suez Crisis"; Eugene Rogan is blunter: "Nasser conquered the Arab world by radio," through Cairo's Voice of the Arabs. Syrian delegations pressed him for union until he agreed, and on 1 February 1958 the United Arab Republic was proclaimed to "stunned amazement, which quickly turned into uncontrolled euphoria." He suppressed Syrian communists; the union collapsed in a Syrian coup in 1961.

He had already gone global. At Bandung in April 1955 he pushed through resolutions on anti-colonialism, North African independence and Palestinian rights with Chinese and Indian backing, then made the "positive neutralism" of Tito and Nehru Egypt's Cold War doctrine. He chaired the Organisation of African Unity in 1964–65 and was the Non-Aligned Movement's second Secretary-General from 1964 until his death. At home he nationalised the remaining British and French holdings in tobacco, cement, pharmaceuticals and phosphates, built the Helwan steelworks into Egypt's largest employer, and got the Aswan Dam built with Soviet help.

The Reckoning

From 1962 Egypt sank into the North Yemen civil war, bleeding men and money. Then, in June 1967, Israel destroyed the Egyptian army in six days. Nasser resigned on television; crowds filled the streets demanding he stay, and he stayed. He made himself prime minister in 1968, launched the War of Attrition to claw back Sinai, and began pulling the army out of politics. On 28 September 1970, hours after closing an Arab League summit, he died of a heart attack at fifty-two. Between five and six million people filled the streets of Cairo for his funeral.

Why Gamal Is Called a Genius

His gift was not scholarship or strategy but political imagination and an unmatched instinct for mass communication. He grasped before anyone else in the region what radio could do to politics: Voice of the Arabs let a Cairo colonel speak directly to peasants and students in Baghdad, Algiers and Damascus, over the heads of their own governments. Rogan's judgement that he "conquered the Arab world by radio" is not a metaphor. Suez shows the same faculty. Handed a humiliation, he found within four days a response that turned a financial defeat into the defining anti-colonial victory of the age — knowing he would probably lose the war that followed. The political scientist Mahmoud Hamad dates his "near-total popular legitimacy" and his standing as "spokesman for the masses not only in Egypt, but all over the Third World" to that speech.

The counter-case is heavy. His military judgement was poor, 1967 a total catastrophe, Yemen a quagmire of his own making. He built a one-party state, jailed and tortured thousands of Muslim Brothers and communists, ran referendums historians call falsified, and left Egypt a pattern of military rule over civilian institutions never since undone. His achievement was to make millions feel they had a voice; the tragedy is that inside Egypt, that voice was only ever his.

Legacy

He redistributed land, dammed the Nile, and gave the postcolonial world a template for defiance that survived his defeats. Egyptians still argue about him, never neutrally: to admirers the author of social justice, Arab dignity and independence; to critics an authoritarian whose adventures cost Egypt Sinai and whose security state outlived him. Both are correct, which is why he has never stopped mattering.