Gamal Abdel Nasser

Gamal Abdel Nasser (born January 15, 1918, Alexandria, Egypt—died September 28, 1970, Cairo) was an Egyptian army officer, prime minister (1954–56), and then president (1956–70) of Egypt who became a controversial leader of the Arab world, creating the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958–61), twice fighting wars with Israel (1956, 1967), and engaging in such inter-Arab policies as mediating the Jordanian civil war (1970).

Early life

Nasser was born in a mud-brick house on an unpaved street in the Bacos section of Alexandria, where his father was in charge of the local post office. In an effort to cultivate a more earthy image of the president as a member of the class of rural agrarians (fellahin), Egyptian government publications for years gave his birthplace as Banī Murr, the primitive Upper Egypt village of his ancestors. From Alexandria, Nasser’s father was transferred to Al-Khaṭāṭibah, a squalid delta village, where the boy got his first schooling. Then he went to live in Cairo with an uncle who had just been released from a British prison and had rooms in a building occupied by nine Jewish families.

Constantly in trouble with schoolteachers, some of them British, Nasser took part in many anti-British street demonstrations. In one he received a blow on the forehead that left a lifelong scar. After secondary school he went to a law college for several months and then entered the Royal Military Academy, graduating as a second lieutenant.

While serving in the Egyptian army in the Sudan, Nasser met three fellow officers—Zakariyyā Muḥyi al-Dīn (Zakaria Mohieddine), later vice president of the United Arab Republic; ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm ʿĀmir, later field marshal; and Anwar el-Sādāt, who would succeed Nasser as president. Together, they planned a secret revolutionary organization, the Free Officers, whose composition would be known only to Nasser; their aim was to oust the British and the Egyptian royal family.

In the 1948 Arab war against the newly created State of Israel, Nasser was an officer in one of three battalions surrounded for weeks by the Israelis in a group of Arab villages called the Faluja Pocket. (See Arab-Israeli wars.)

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Attainment of power

On July 23, 1952, Nasser and 89 other Free Officers staged an almost bloodless coup d’état, ousting the monarchy. Sādāt favoured the immediate public execution of King Farouk I and some members of the establishment, but Nasser vetoed the idea and permitted Farouk and others to go into exile. The country was taken over by a Revolutionary Command Council of 11 officers controlled by Nasser, with Major General Muḥammad Naguib as the puppet head of state. For more than a year Nasser kept his real role so well hidden that astute foreign correspondents were unaware of his existence, but in the spring of 1954, in a complicated series of intrigues, Naguib was deposed and placed under house arrest, and Nasser emerged from the shadows and named himself prime minister. That same year an Egyptian fanatic allegedly tried to assassinate Nasser at a mass meeting in Alexandria. When the gunman confessed that he had been given the assignment by the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser cracked down on this extremist Muslim religious organization.

In January 1956 Nasser announced the promulgation of a constitution under which Egypt became a socialist Arab state with a one-party political system and with Islam as the official religion. In June, 99.948 percent of the five million Egyptians voting marked their ballots for Nasser, the only candidate, for president. The constitution was approved by 99.8 percent.

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As Nasser took titular as well as actual control, Egypt’s prospects looked bright. A secret contract had been signed with Czechoslovakia for war matériel, and Great Britain and the United States had agreed to put up $270 million to finance the first stage of the Aswān High Dam project. But on July 20, 1956, the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, canceled the U.S. offer; the next day Britain followed suit. Five days later, addressing a mass meeting in Alexandria, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, promising that the tolls Egypt collected in five years would build the dam. Both Britain and France had interests in the canal and conspired with Israel—whose relations with Egypt had grown even more tense after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948–49—to best Nasser and regain control of the canal. According to their plan, on October 29, 1956, Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Two days later, French and British planes attacked Egyptian airfields. Although the Israelis occupied the Sinai Peninsula to Sharm al-Shaykh and the Egyptian air force was virtually destroyed, Nasser emerged from the brief war with undiminished prestige throughout the Arab world. (See Suez Crisis.)

In Philosophy of the Revolution, which he wrote in 1954, Nasser told of “heroic and glorious roles which never found heroes to perform them” and outlined his aspiration to be the leader of the 55 million Arabs, then of the 224 million Africans, then of the 420 million followers of Islam. In 1958 Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic, which Nasser hoped would someday include the entire Arab world. Syria withdrew in 1961, but Egypt continued to be known as the United Arab Republic until 1971. That was as close as Nasser ever came to realizing his tripartite dream.