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Nasser: Gamal Abdel Nasser
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The family of Gamal Abdel Nasser were well-to-do Moslem peasants who lived in Beni Morr near Asyût (Upper Egypt). His father was a post-office employee. Gamal was born on Jan. 15, 1918, in Alexandria. As early as his grammar school years, he participated in demonstrations against the English occupation of Egypt. In 1937 he entered the military academy at Cairo; he left the following year with the rank of second lieutenant.
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Gamal Abdel Nasser was a leader in uniting Arab-speaking people. As a youth, he became a revolutionary opposed to British rule in Egypt. In 1952, Nasser led a military overthrow of King Farouk, and two years later assumed the title of president.
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After savage anti-British riots, preceding Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolution, Lings returned to Britain in 1952. He earned a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies for his thesis on the Algerian Sufi, Ahmad al-Alawi. He published it in 1961 as a book, ''A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century.''
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These contrary perspectives, as much as the richly varied aspects of Gamal Abdel Nasser's life and personality, indicate the immense complexity of the man and his political achievement. This complexity has been consistently simplified, homogenized and flattened by his fans and foes.
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Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was born in 1918 and died in 1970. Nasser was a pivotal figure in the recent history of the Middle East and played a highly prominent role in the 1956 Suez Crisis. Nasser has been described as the first leader of an Arab nation who challenged what was perceived as the western dominance of the Middle East. Nasser remains a highly revered figure in both Egypt and the Arab world.
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Many aficionados of Arab cinema recall a famous scene in Nasser 56, the film made to commemorate the Suez war of 1956. An old Egyptian woman from Upper Egypt, the region from which Gamal Abdel Nasser hails, gets a chance to talk to Nasser in private. She hands him a wretched, flimsy pair of trousers which used to belong to her grandfather. She tells Nasser that the man was, like millions of Egyptian youths, taken from his village to al-sokhra (slavery) to join the brigades digging the Suez canal. And like many of those millions, he never returned; he died young, far away from his family and his home.
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Gamal Abdel Nasser