Gamal Abdel Nasser: Between Deification and Demonization
One of the strange phenomena that now accompanies every Arab occasion is that it turns into bouts of convulsions, chest-beating, and cursing of Gamal Abdel Nasser. So, what about an occasion that is specifically related to him, like the anniversary of his death or the July 23 Revolution?!
I have not observed, in any other country, the kind of criticism, attacks, and character assassination directed at its historical heroes the way it happens in Egypt in particular. I have never come across a Burkinabé citizen cursing Thomas Sankara, or a Chilean citizen cursing Salvador Allende!
And by “citizens” here, I mean what we might metaphorically call the “indigenous people of the country”—not the 1% elite of thieves who were harmed by the revolutions and decisions of Sankara, Allende, and Nasser.
The Egyptian treatment of history is as distorted as our present. Instead of dealing with Abdel Nasser’s era as a central, pivotal historical experience in the broader context of Egyptian and Arab history, we approach it with a strange dysfunction—oscillating between deification and demonization. This crude imbalance blinds even the clear-sighted from assessing the experience truthfully and critically for the purpose of learning from it as one episode in a long series of historical struggle.
If you look closely at those carrying the torches of demonization, you’ll find them fall into three categories: failed and deranged political Islamists wherever they may go, capitalists of both liberal and secular political wings, and reactionary regimes—whether monarchies or banana republics. Under each of these elite categories, you’ll find populist citizens parroting slogans, phrases, and attributing disasters like the "defeat in the 1954 war!"—an event that never even happened. If this tells us anything, it reveals the depth of foolishness, decline, and erosion that has afflicted the Egyptian mind, which should not surprise us nor prevent us from asking: how did we reach this abyss? How did someone like Sisi come to rule Egypt?
The truth is, everything these three elite groups and their social media followers and chauvinists repeat can be refuted and dismantled. In fact, defending Abdel Nasser against the accusations they fling at him is much easier than trying to fabricate and prove those accusations.
The catastrophe is that these people do not actually criticize the real mistakes of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s experience. Rather, they attack its gains and achievements. Just follow what they write about the nationalization of the Suez Canal, agrarian reform, the High Dam, or even the foreign policy of the Nasser era that positioned Egypt as one of the most powerful and influential countries in its region. All of these achievements, they view as flaws and errors. This is dysfunction in its purest form.
On the other hand, we find those who call themselves “Nasserists,” who in truth are the biggest burden on Abdel Nasser’s legacy—even more so than his opponents, whose arguments can be easily dismantled.
These so-called Nasserists fall into two categories: mercenaries who feed off the legacy, wrapping Nasser’s cloak around half-men in pursuit of gifts and dollars (Mostafa Bakry being the most prominent example). Under this category also fall all the children of the late leader, who became millionaires despite their father dying with just a few pounds in his account. Let us not forget that Huda Abdel Nasser was among the criminals who justified and defended—even insulted—Gamal Abdel Nasser’s history when she claimed that she had found papers among her father’s belongings proving that Tiran and Sanafir were Saudi territories. That claim was celebrated by Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya channel, which is one of the main mouthpieces of the reactionary regimes that hate Abdel Nasser’s legacy the most!
Even his son, Khaled Gamal Abdel Nasser—whom the Nasserists proudly claim was a member of the Egypt Revolution Organization—disavowed membership during the trial, according to Nazmi Shaheen, one of the organization’s members and the sixth defendant in the indictment.
That bitterness felt by Nazmi Shaheen is deeply rooted in the hearts of Egyptians—even those who admire, respect, and love Gamal Abdel Nasser and his experience. The truth is that Nasser and his legacy are one thing, and his children are something completely different. So are those opportunists who exploit the experience—whether materially (in dollars, riyals, or dirhams), socially (with status and good reputation), or even those who pretend to honor Nasser as a means of protecting themselves from the wrath of Sisi, the most hideous and treacherous version of Camp David. These opportunists flee from the reality of Sisi’s betrayal and the military leadership’s treason (which is logical given their origin in Camp David and Sadat’s path), either by invoking Nasser and trading on his legacy, or by attacking every opponent of Sisi—Islamists, liberals—using leftist or pan-Arab rhetoric, while totally ignoring all of Sisi’s betrayals of everything Nasser’s legacy once stood for, even everything truly Egyptian. At best, they stop at criticizing Sadat (though he is the ideological father of Sisi), just to avoid ending up in Sisi’s prisons, evading his brutal repression. One of the most notable of these opportunists is a man named Sayyed Shibl and those like him.
The other group of Nasserists are those whose sense of time stopped in 1970—the moment Nasser died. Time stopped for them, and their minds ceased to function. These people are best described as being in a state of romantic emotional paralysis resulting from the sudden and dramatic collapse of the project with the death of its leader. They express no ideological position from which the future can be envisioned. It’s simply nostalgia for a past that held the first complete national experience in modern Egyptian history. That’s all. But to claim this nostalgia as an organizing ideology for resistance and struggle is something Nasserists must move beyond, as my friend Gilgamesh Lukbanda so aptly described.
This type of Nasserist is like the archival department. Rarely do they offer solutions to today’s problems. All they focus on is clinging to the past, to a glorious yet flawed experience. Sometimes they’re right to defend it, especially since the campaign against Nasser’s legacy is deliberate and vile.
The real crisis with both types of Nasserists lies in their desperate attempts to insist that Egypt’s liberation depended solely on the person of Gamal Abdel Nasser. This position diminishes and even insults the Egyptian people’s movement, portraying them as passive and submissive, as the enemies of the people often claim. It also contradicts the laws of social development, the logic of history, and the long-standing tradition of rebellion in Egypt.
Who knows—perhaps the 1952 revolution or coup actually preempted (as some writers and communists argue) a genuine popular revolution that merely needed more time to mature. Perhaps it disrupted the natural and expected evolution of this revolution through a series of steps that stunted political and civic development in Egypt. (Even if the July 1952 regime was compelled to take such steps by its historical circumstances and the surrounding challenges of the time.)
The Nasserists fail to see how these steps destroyed Egypt in the medium and long term. Since the experience was tied to Nasser alone, it ended entirely with his death. (This is the crucial point that Abdel Nasser’s opponents refuse to acknowledge: that Nasser’s rule and the July Revolution ended with his death.) After that, Sadat’s coup in May 1971 effectively ended the July 1952 Revolution and all of Nasser’s achievements, and entrenched its mistakes. The people paid the price—not only for Nasser’s errors but also for the systematic dismantling of his accomplishments by every ruler who followed, who diligently erased every gain that July and Nasser's era had established.
This raises an important question: Would it have been better to wait for a full popular uprising to erupt—a revolution that would not have handed the country to a group of officers who merely replaced royal feudalism with a new military feudalism of plunder and authoritarian rule? Or was the army movement a historical necessity to save Egypt from further collapse under a reckless monarch like King Farouk?
Personally, I lean toward the second view: that the July Revolution was a historical necessity for Egypt. Delaying it would have meant deeper collapse and greater failure to keep up with the demands of the era.
The same logic applies today to ending military rule in Egypt. It is a historical necessity. Every day Egypt remains under military control means further collapse and greater delay in catching up with the modern world. It even increases the likelihood of the chilling prophecy warned about by the great martyr Gamal Hamdan—that Egypt would become merely a historical term instead of a geographic one.
This article was published on the "Katobgy" blog on September 28, 2021 (the anniversary of the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser).
رحم الله الزعيم جمال عبدالناصر.. عظيم المجد والأخطاء
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