 The
following presentation is a series of reflections
from the following articles from the BBC online
-“Nasser's Mixed Legacy” by Roger Hardy
-“1956: Egypt Seizes the Suez Canal” – BBC online
-“Egyptians Celebrate a New Era in History” by John
Simpson
-”How Islam got political: Founding fathers” by
Mukul Devichand
 And
from Time Magazine
“World: Nasser's Legacy: Hope and Instability”
 On
July 23, 1952, a group of military men known as
the Free Officers seized power in Egypt, toppling
the British-backed monarchy and setting the
country on a new political path
 It was the first time Egypt had been ruled by
Egyptians for two and a half millennia
 The country had been conquered by a succession of
foreigners - Persians, Greeks, Romans, Circassians,
Arabs, Turks and finally the British
 So
Gamal Abdul Nasser, and the other young army
officers, won huge popular acclaim when they
ended the much-resented domination of the
British, ejected the effete and pleasure-loving King
Farouq and turned the country into a republic
 Half a century on, Nasser's legacy is the subject of
hot debate
 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s and until his death
in 1970, he dominated Arab politics and the
popular imagination of the Arab masses
 Nasser
embodied pan-Arabism - the dream of a
united Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to
the Gulf
 His message, of social justice at home and anticolonialism abroad, restored Arab dignity
 But
to his critics, Nasser had led the Arabs down a
cul-de-sac
 He aligned Egypt with the Soviet Union, and so
ended up on the losing side in the Cold War
 Relying on Soviet aid, he built up a monolithic
state-run economy - which his successors have ever
since been struggling to demolish
 His
rule was harshly authoritarian
 Opponents, ranging from communists to the Muslim
Brotherhood, were jailed and sometimes tortured
 Many were driven into exile
 Finally, the pan-Arab dream was a costly failure
 Arabs proved, in practice, unable to unite under
Nasser's leadership
 The high hopes of 1952 ended in bitter defeat by
Israel in the June war of 1967
-
Remembering the Nationalization of the Suez Canal
Company
 On
July 26, 1956, Egypt's president, Colonel Gamal
Abdel Nasser, announced the nationalization of the
Suez Canal Company to provide funding for the
construction of the Aswan High Dam
 The British Government and French stockholders
who owned shares in the Suez Canal Company
reacted with shock to the news
 Nasser said all company assets in Egypt had been
frozen and stockholders would be paid the price of
their shares according to the day’s closing prices on
the Paris Stock Exchange
 The
Suez Canal  a key waterway for world trade
and an important source of revenue for Britain
 The Suez Canal Company, which managed the
waterway, was legally Egyptian but, in 1869 was
granted a 99 years' concession
 It was not due to revert to the Egyptian
Government until November 16, 1968
 President
Nasser, who took control of Egypt
following a coup d'état began implementing a
nationalization program in the country, and was
vehement in his criticism of the West
 Nasser said 120,000 Egyptians had died building the
canal but Egypt was receiving just a tiny proportion
of the company's annual earnings
 President
Nasser's decision to nationalize the Suez
Canal company came following Britain and
America's withdrawal of financial assistance
towards the Aswan Dam
 Instead the USSR agreed to provide an
unconditional loan towards the project
 Nasser’s
legacy: (From Time Magazine)
-Nasser overturned a rotting monarchy 18 years ago
and brought visions of prosperity to his own
country and hope for new unity to a diffuse and
frustrated Arab world
-
Nasser carried out drastic land reforms, wiping out
a parasitic pasha class that had lived off the
poverty-stricken peasants for generations
-
But he was finally forced to admit that his dreams
of building a modern industrial nation had gone and
that the most he could do for his overpopulated
land was to keep it from sliding backward
 Nasser
had himself mostly to blame
 He precipitated a succession of feuds and intrigues
with virtually every one of Egypt's Arab neighbors
 He was humiliatingly trounced in two wars with
Israel, and sent 70,000 Egyptian soldiers off on a
bloody misadventure in Yemen
 To rebuild his army, he allowed himself to become
the bondsman of the Soviet Union, and he
squandered Egypt's limited resources in pursuit of
disastrously misguided goals
 Yet
for all his mistakes and shortcomings, Nasser
managed one inestimable accomplishment
 To the people of Egypt and the rest of the Arab
world, he imparted a sense of personal worth and
national pride that they had not known for 400
years
 Reflections
and thoughts from the article:
“Egyptians Celebrate a New Era in History”
By John Simpson
BBC News
February 11, 2011
The Author’s Thesis: “In its way the overthrow of
President Hosni Mubarak is as significant as the
collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe back
in 1989.”
 So
why has Mr. Hosni Mubarak gone after insisting
that he would stay until the presidential elections
in six or seven months time?
 Two main reasons  The Americans - who had been
embarrassed, helpless, onlookers - finally
summoned up all their power and influence to
force the Egyptian military to get rid of Mr.
Mubarak
 And the military leaders realized that cracks were
starting to appear in the army's structure
 Many junior officers, ordinary soldiers, sided with
the demonstrators while the generals backed the
president who was one of their own
 There
is a historical echo to this
 In the 1952 revolution against the monarchy, some
senior officers supported the king, while younger
ones like Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser backed the
coup
 Nasser became president after sweeping his boss,
General Naguib, aside
 Since Nasser, only two presidents have ruled Egypt,
Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak
 For
sixty years Egypt has been a military
dictatorship backed by a nasty secret police force
 No doubt reluctantly, the army leaders have
brought Nasser's system to an end
 It would never have happened though had it not
been for the tremendous fortitude of the tens of
thousands of people who took control of Tahrir
Square and refused to leave
 On Friday 28 January, the police attacked them
with bricks, iron bars, and live ammunition
 Yet the protesters would not be budged
 Right
from the start the soldiers who were sent in
to discourage the demonstrators from taking over
the square showed themselves to be clearly
sympathetic
 That, in the end, proved decisive
 Now the Egyptians have the prospect of voting for
their own leader in the coming presidential
election
 In Egypt's 5,000 years as a unitary state, Egyptians
have never been able to choose their government
before
From “How Islam Got Political”
 While
the practical emergence of a political Islam
came with the Iranian Revolution, it was the
thoughts of two men long before hand which
provided much of the inspiration for Islamists
around the world
 Syed Abul Ala Maududi was one of these two men
 His ideas opposed secularism and were arguably
edged with a hint of antipathy towards Western
society, almost certainly influenced by his
childhood in British colonial India
 Maududi's
critics asked how a journalist who had
never completed theological training could be
qualified to write about Islam
 But his adherents regarded him as a "revivalist",
someone who wanted Islam to reclaim its former
glory, a century after the British had defeated
India's Muslim rulers
 Maududi's vision of an Islamic state went beyond
the 1947 creation of Pakistan, a homeland for
south Asian Muslims, after the British withdrawal
from India
 When his political party, Jamaat-i-Islami took to
the streets, the secular Pakistan government jailed
him
 Another
influential thinker in the Islamic world was
Egypt's military ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser
 Nasser offered a different vision for the Islamic
world
 He had a vision of secular nationalism
 In turn, he sought to suppress the Muslim
Brotherhood, one of the most important
movements in the history of political Islam
 The
Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in Egypt
in 1928 to promote Islamic values
 President Nasser feared and distrusted the Muslim
Brotherhood which was founded in 1929
 While many of its projects concentrated on social
works, it was its political edge that concerned
Nasser
 One of those imprisoned by the president was
writer Sayyid Qutb, a schoolteacher who had
worked in America
 Qutb
had found America and its culture an
uncomfortable experience; on his return to Egypt
he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an apparent
reaction to his antipathy towards his interpretation
of Western society
 His own thinking was influenced by one of the key
ideas favored by Maududi - that Muslims risked
falling into the state of "ignorance" (in Arabic
“jahiliyya”) that existed prior to the revelation of
Islam by allowing their faith to be mixed by ideas
from the West
 Sayyid
Qutb now took this concept much further,
after his own views grew more extreme under
torture by his Egyptian jailers
 He said that almost all the world's Muslims were in
fact living in ignorance, in Jahiliyya - and that true
Islam was almost extinct
 But Qutb then went further: he claimed that
Muslims who did not adhere to this strict
interpretation of their faith were subject to
“takfir” – excommunication
 Traditional
Sufi Muslims objected strongly to the
idea, not least because they demanded to know
who had the power to decide, other than God,
whether someone was a good Muslim
 However,
Qutb in the 1960s believed that since
almost all the world's Muslims were essentially
ignorant of Islam, the only true Muslims would be
those who struggled with him, as part of his
vanguard for Islamic revolution
 This has led some scholars and writers to compare
Islamist movements with communism
 Jason Burke, a writer on Al-Qaeda, says Qutb's
book, 'Milestones', was a turning point for political
Islam
 "If you look at Milestones, you can see it is almost a
Communist Manifesto, but in Islamic terms," he
says
 The
Egyptian Muslim Brothers found a powerful
new patron in Saudi King Faisal, according to Dr
Ghayasuddin Siddiqui
 It was an exciting time for political Islam
 Activists from all over the world found refuge in
Saudi Arabia where money flowed and there were
jobs for everyone
 As the activists came into the country, new
organizations sprouted - some of them running
camps to spread their political ideas
 And when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,
those seeking a cause in which to fight for the glory
of their faith, knew where they would now turn
A
deal was struck between the Muslim Brothers and
Saudi Arabia, that Saudis would give jobs and
protection to the Muslim Brother leadership and in
return the Muslim Brothers would mobilize Islamic
movements in support of the Saudis
 "They got together for the glory and leadership of
Saudi Arabia as the custodian of two holy places of
Islam."
 In
the decade after Sayyid Qutb's execution in
1966, his ideology spread