Encyclopedia of Islam

Nasser, Gamal Abdel

  See n

asir

, J

amal

 a

bd

 

al

-

Nasir, Jamal Abd al-

 

(Gamal Abdel 

Nasser)

 

(1918–1970)  charismatic president of 

Egypt from 1954 to 1970

Jamal Abd al-Nasir was born on January 15, 1918. 

The son of a lower-middle-class postal official, 

Abd al-Nasir served with distinction in the 1948 

Arab-Israeli war. As a lieutenant colonel in the 

Egyptian army, he was the leader of the Free Offi-

cers, a group of mainly young officers in the mili-

tary from the lower or lower middle classes. The 

Free Officers successfully overthrew King Farouk 

on July 23, 1952, and established the Revolution-

ary Command Council, which became the ruling 

political group of e

gypt

. Abd al-Nasir was elected 

president in 1956.

Abd al-Nasir was a strong nationalist, and his 

secular policies quickly alienated him from the 

m

Uslim

 b

rotherhood

. In 1954, after an assassina-

tion attempt, Abd al-Nasir promptly purged the 

organization, imprisoning its members and hang-

ing its leaders. While successful in the short run 

in disabling the Muslim Brotherhood as an effec-

tive organization, the purges contributed to the 

growth and development of Islamist movements 

in Egypt and throughout the world—Islamists 

such as s

ayyid

  q

Utb

 (d. 1966), who even today 

remains influential, were able to write and lay the 

ideological groundwork for radical i

slamism

. Abd 

al-Nasir, however, remained immensely popular, 

especially among lower- and middle-class urban 

workers and rural dwellers in Egypt and in the 

wider Arab world.

Abd al-Nasir accomplished a major achieve-

ment in reforming the 

edUcation

 system by mak-

ing it free for all Egyptians. This would eventually 

backfire, however, as universities later became a 

hotbed for breeding Islamic opposition. Abd al-

Nasir’s economic policies carried a socialist bent 

to them, and another one of his achievements 

was reforming land laws, limiting the size of land 

holdings for large landowners and redistribut-

ing acreage to the lower classes; however, while 

certain of his economic policies were popular 

with many Egyptians, his regime became increas-

ingly autocratic as time passed. Ruling during the 

height of the cold war, Abd al-Nasir leaned toward 

the Soviet Union, which provided financial sup-

port for the construction of the Aswan Dam in 

1964. One of his most visible legacies, the Aswan 

Dam introduced electricity to much of rural Egypt 

but also created major environmental problems.

In 1956 Abd al-Nasir received wide acclaim in 

Egypt and throughout the Arab world for seizing 

the Suez Canal from Britain, and his popularity 

quickly swelled as a symbol of pan-Arab national-

ism. As Abd al-Nasir’s status across the Arab world 

increased, he sought to capitalize on his notoriety 

by pursuing a foreign policy increasingly interna-

tional in scope. In 1958 Egypt and Syria agreed 

to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), theo-

retically merging the two countries into a single, 

K  518