Voice of Egypt

Trevor Mostyn

Nasser: The last Arab
Said K. Aburish
355pp. Duckworth

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 2005

EGYPT'S GAMAL ABDEL NASSER was dedicated to Arab unity, admired America for its republicanism, wanted peace with Israel and detested British and French imperialism, Communism and political Islam. For almost all Arabs, he had immense charisma. When he spoke, every Arab listened. He was handsome, tall and had a broad, easy smile. The beloved singer Umm Kulthum wrote songs in his praise.

Nasser set the course for a third way, "positive neutralism", after he attended the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 and became close to non-aligned leaders such as China's Chou En-lai and Yugoslavia's Tito. Nasser wanted to give Egypt back its long-lost dignity but his dreams withered when Egypt's union with Syria (the United Arab Republic) broke down in 1961, after only three years, and they were totally shattered after Israel's overwhelming defeat of Egypt in 1967, in what Israelis call the "Six Day War".

He never recovered from this catastrophe, in which Israel took Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. A serious diabetic, he died three years later of a heart attack, only hours after trying to reconcile Jordan's King Hussein with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat - a last-ditch effort to avoid civil war in Jordan. Five million people attended his funeral, yet, despite his reasonable outlook and aversion to bloodshed, Nasser became as much of a hate figure to the West as Osama bin Laden is today. Said K.Aburish, who has known and written about so many Arab leaders, explains why in Nasser: The last Arab.

Some Arabs, reduced to praising Saddam Hussein in 1991 for supporting the Palestinians before the Western coalition forced him to leave Kuwait, claimed him as their new Nasser. No two men could differ more. Saddam was a violent, unpredictable tyrant, Nasser a man who wanted democracy, hated violence and was ready to forgive. He changed the Arab world's political map for ever.

Aburish says he stopped his car on a Californian road and wept, when he heard the news of Nasser's death. "King Hussein of Jordan sobbed like a baby. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya fainted twice", he writes.

An idealistic young army officer who had flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood in his search for a movement that would resurrect Egypt's pride, Nasser the idealist emerged from the scandalous failure of the Arabs to stand up to Israel after it declared its Independence on May 15, 1948. Egyptian soldiers were sent to the front with defective guns and, when defeat appeared inevitable, officers scuttled back to the comfort of Cairo's Gezira Club. The army coup Nasser led against Farouk's effete monarchy in 1952 was a soft one. The King was sent away on his yacht to a twenty-one-gun salute, at Nasser's request and thanks to his arguments against calls for the former King's execution. This marked out the path of moderation which Nasser would follow until the 1967 defeat broke him.

Aburish describes the huge, spontaneous crowds that filled Cairo's streets that night, forcing him to withdraw his resignation, but his last three, embittered years were to bring with them a harsh dictatorship bred from his despair.

From the start he was a hate figure to a Britain which saw Egypt as a relic of empire (the wartime British Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson called Farouk "the boy", just as Aburish quotes the US Ambassador Jefferson Caffery calling Nasser's Young Officers "my boys"). Nasser's revolutionary struggle to raise the standards of Egypt's poor would involve the eventual flight of much of Egypt's affluent elite, a factor to which Aburish gives little space. Egyptians today blame the country's economic atrophy on a massive bureaucracy Nasser created to administer a Soviet-style, centrally planned economy, and crude state takeovers of private industries, not least in the vital agricultural sector.

"Palestine", writes Aburish, "was to Nasser what the Dreyfus case was to the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl." He wanted justice for the Palestinians, but knew that dialogue with Israel was inevitable. Perhaps he would have accepted a two-state solution. At all events, Israel refused to accept that he really wanted peace, or else they did not want to accept it. Israel's clumsy attempts to manipulate anti-Nasser feeling in the Lavon Affair, codenamed Operation Susannah (1954), threatened to reveal to ordinary Egyptians his efforts at dialogue at a time when his media were attacking Israel. The affair became, for the Israelis, esek habish, or "the mishap". Israeli agents planned a series of bombs against British and United States targets in Egypt, implicating the Egyptians as the terrorists. But the Israelis were found out, their spy network was revealed, and Nasser was finally forced into an anti-Israeli position. The Israelis were either being malicious -Aburish argues that peace with Egypt was not in their interest - or incompetent. At all events, Israel drove a wedge between the US and Egypt (he suggests that the CIA supported Nasser's revolution), eventually pushing Egypt into the camp of the Soviet Union which would build the crucial Aswan High Dam after the US refused to finance it.

Nasser came to believe that the US, increasingly determined to identify him as a proto-Communist and influenced against him by the Israelis, was declaring economic war on Egypt.

Nasser's propaganda radio station Sawt al-Arab (the "Voice of the Arabs") was listened to in every coffee house from Sana'a to Baghdad. It lambasted Arab leaders seen to be working for the British. Iraq's puppet Prime Minister, Nuri Said, told Britain's Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, to "Hit him (Nasser) hard and hit him now". Eden needed no persuading. He would react to Nasser's name hysterically, shouting, "I want him destroyed". The Suez adventure in 1956 followed a secret British-French-Israeli meeting at which it was agreed that Israel would invade Sinai up to the Suez Canal and Britain and France would then play the arbiter and order both sides back to ten miles behind the canal, sending Egypt's army hundreds of miles behind its own front lines. Britain and France invaded the Suez Canal area. The perfidy increased Nasser's hatred of Britain, the power which had humiliated Egypt for so long, as well as of France, which was doing the same in Algeria. Washington forced the three countries to withdraw, winning Nasser's admiration for the US. The Suez affair made him almost godlike to the Arab world and beyond. It helped spark the expulsion from Jordan of King Hussein's British army commander, John Bagot Glubb, and a bloody revolution in Iraq in 1958.

Two Arab figures stand out in the minds of most people today, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. For some Palestinians, desperate for a new Nasser, Saddam briefly fitted the bill. But for most Arabs such symbolism merely made the memory of Nasser, the man of principle who was proud to have been born poor and said he always wanted to remain poor, all the more nostalgic. Saddam lived in numerous palaces and tried to claim Hashemite descent. He had his enemies horribly tortured and killed. Nasser lived in a modest house and ate modestly.

He was so shaken by the screams of a woman bystander at his first attempt at political assassination that he renounced the policy.

Aburish leaves one hungry to know more about Nasser's private life. He was a loyal husband, in contrast with his childhood friend, the corrupt, womanizing Abdel Hakim Amer. Amer went soft and failed him as head of the army during the

1967 war, conspiring against him after it. At first Nasser was unwilling to punish Amer, yet the latter's subsequent suicide is not properly explained. Did Nasser himself order it and to what extent did he regret it? The US wanted a bipolarized international system, in which there was little room for Nasser's policy of non-alignment. In order to contain the Soviet Union and to safeguard their interests in the area, Britain, France, the US and Turkey encouraged the concept of a Middle East regional defence organization, which would give birth to the Baghdad Pact in 1950. To Nasser, the Pact was merely an extension of imperialist policy. Today the US has returned to the region with a Neoconservative blueprint for democracy in Iraq, a policy which is inspiring a virtual civil war. Many Arabs see Prime Minister Allawi as a resurrection of Nuri Said.

Since Nasser's death, Islamic fundamentalism -sometimes expressed violently has been the only ideology to capture the Arab imagination. Nasser stood for secularism, social justice and political non-alignment. Said Aburish argues that the clash of civilizations that is emerging today is a result of the Western encouragement of political Islam and its opposition to Nasser's ideals.

His book has a few errors. "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) is written "Allahu Akhbar" ("akhbar" means "news" -the error is obviously not the author's). But it is a fascinating account, written with passion by an author whose sources are mostly first-hand. 

© Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com