Nasser Quotes

We will fight from house to house, from village to village. We will fight than live humiliated. We are building our country, our history, our future.

هكذا هي الحياة يجب على الجميع تعاطي الحب ، و إلا ابواب المصحات النفسيه تسع للملايين

She opened her sketchbook, carefully tore out several pages and handed them to Nasser--three detailed color sketches of three flowers. Leafing through the pages, he translated the message. A petunia: Your presence soothes me. A peppermint flower: warmth of feeling. And heartsease, the flower he'd given her so many times before. You occupy my thoughts. "I've been doing a lot of reading," Lee said quietly, setting her sketchbook aside. "You're not the only one who knows what flowers mean.

Nasser found himself imagining her, without wanting to: those large green eyes, and freckles, and sweet bow lips.

NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and availble. That's why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.

Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.

Nasser found himself imagining her, without wanting to: those large green eyes, and freckles, and sweet boy lips.

How is everything, Nadia," he said. "It's hot." I replied, smiling a little bit. "Never forget," Nasser said, teasing me. "It's very hot, Nasser, it's very hot.

Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, “Britain would become another Netherlands.

But not all Gaza residents were committed to the war. A reporter asked one of the Arabs what he most wanted. He was a taxi driver, father of ten. All he wanted was 'to eat and to work.' What did he think of Nasser? 'Nasser is good, Israel is good, America is good, Britain is good, Canada is good, India is good, Anything is good.

تكون المرأه فاتنه عندما لا تعرف شيئاً عن جمالها .

I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace.

Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force.

October twenty-second..." Lee read, trailing off as she reached the year. Her insides went cold. She whirled around, her voice quavering. "What is this? Don't screw with me!" "What is it?" Nasser asked? "The date is wrong." He knew it, of course. He had to know. "How wrong?" "Seven years wrong!" Lee shrieked. "What is this? Where am I?" Nasser opened his mouth, but all that came out was a series of stammers. Filo glared at him, then turned to Lee. "You want to know what's happening?" "Yes," Lee sobbed, nodding feebly. "Please." "Okay," Filo offered. "What do you know about faeries?

Nasser Hussain, whose fondness for jargon – any ball that is missing leg stump, for instance, is “just going down” – makes no concession to the non-expert audience, possibly because such a thing no longer exists. New to the box, Sourav Ganguly was a real find, speaking only when there was something to say, then making sure it was something worth saying.

If you touch someone's skin and you find it soft, well guess what ; the snake has soft skin too.

The flower is here, so let's dance here.

يَحدث أن تغيب الشمس ولكن ثمّة شروق آخر

I like Nasser. He’s creepy, but he seems sensible. For a vampire.

Say,' Uzi pressed on, 'is it true that when you people go out on a job they promise you seventy nymphomaniac virgins in Kingdom Come? All for you, Solico?' 'Sure, they promise,' Nassar said, 'and look what it got me. Lukewarm vodka.' 'So you're just a sucker in the end, eh, ya Nasser,' Uzi gloated. 'Sure thing,' Nasser nodded. 'And you, what did they promise you?

„The holy march on which the Arab nation insists, will carry us forward from one victory to another … the flag of freedom which flies over Baghdad today will fly over Amman and Riyadh. Yes, the flag of freedom which flies over Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad today will fly over the rest of the Middle East

Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion—atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth—and said, “Let the Americans come.” Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah—in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services—tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That’s where we are right now.

Nasser was dead. Israel’s military superiority had effectively neutralized any Syrian threat. Pan-Arabism was a thing of the past. Yet once again, Israel found itself arrayed against another enemy sworn to its destruction.

PAPA: This damn country has done us in. That's why I'm like this. We should be there. Home. NASSER: But that country has been sodomized by religion. It is beginning to interfere with the making of money. Compared with everywhere, it is a little heaven here.

In summing up the affair in his memoirs, president Eisenhower seemed to settle upon one rationale in particular, and this is probably the closest to the truth of the matter. This was to put the world—and specifically the Soviet Union and Nasser—on notice that the United States had virtually unlimited power, that this power could be transported to any corner of the world with great speed, that it could and would be used to deal decisively with any situation with which the United States was dissatisfied, for whatever reason.

In 1951, the political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum to describe the often misleading comparison of an opponent’s views or behavior to those of Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. The reductio ad Hitlerum, applied to Nasser, became a trope of British and French political language in the summer of 1956.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.

The only chance of a rupture is if Mubarak decides to push Gamal toward the presidency despite objections put forward by the military. The reason the military may object is that Gamal, unlike Nasser, Al-Sadat, and Mubarak himself, is not from within their own military ranks. Some point to the possibility of a military coup in such circumstances.

I lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the evening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw them out in 1956.” “Why did he throw them out?” “He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got scared and left. By the way, what’s your opinion of Abd el Nasser?” “I was born after he died. I don’t know. Some people say he was a hero and others say he was a criminal.” “Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt. He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damage he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.” “So why do people love him?” “Who says people love him?” “Lots of people that I know love him.” “Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or did well out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregs of society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a good man and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the Military College and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruled Egypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of course they have to love Abd el Nasser; he was the boss of their gang.

إنَّ الذي يشكو إليكَ مُصابهُ، وأتاكَ يبكي لاذَ تحتَ حماكَ „ خُذهُ إليكَ وضُمَهُ، فهو الذي، ما اختارَ من هذي الجُموعُ سواكَ „

خُلِقَ الانسان، ليزيد الطينَ بلة!

but things aren’t real in the South if we don’t say them out loud.

Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.

Awareness of your weakness is the first step for correction

Every day, I remind myself to take the long view of all this. The current madness will have to end, eventually, I'll simply need to outlast it, rather than allowing it to weaken me.

Nasser turned to me, a serious expression on his face. “Nadia, you’re with Sabah now, and you’ll be going to join the rest of your family. There’s no need for me to come. But I need to ask you something. Do you feel safe? If you are scared at all that something is going to happen to you or that they will do anything to you because you were a sabiyya, I’ll stay with you.

The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.

The word for “revolution” in German is Umwälzung. What it means is a complete overturn—a complete change. The overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt and the succession of President Nasser is an example of a true revolution. It means the destroying of an old system, and its replacement with a new system. Another example is the Algerian revolution, led by Ben Bella; they threw out the French who had been there over 100 years. So how does anybody sound talking about the Negro in America waging some “revolution”? Yes, he is condemning a system—but he’s not trying to overturn the system, or to destroy it. The Negro’s so-called “revolt” is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system! A true Negro revolt might entail, for instance, fighting for separate black states within this country—which several groups and individuals have advocated, long before Elijah Muhammad came along.

And believe me, Derek, Chip Carter is not the kind of guy anyone could overlook. Those freshman girls he exposed himself to are going to need a lot of counseling in their relationships if they expect their future husbands to be Chip Carter-sized, if you catch my drift.

Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. The British did not create the Arab-Jewish conflict, though they may have aggravated it. If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent. It is true that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands and homes were far from adequate.

The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism. In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.

Jamie popped a handful of Skittles into his bottle of Grolsch. He took a swig and savoured the tangy sweets shrinking in his mouth. He glanced up at the pictures on the pub wall: Alexander Graham Bell, Busby the bird and Sam Spade. The picture of Bogart made Jamie want to put a fag in his mouth

NASSER: (about OMAR): Haven't you trained him up to look after you, like I have done with my girls? PAPA: He brushes the dust from one place to another. He squeezes shirts and heats soup. But that hardly stretches him. Though his food stretches me. It's only for a few months, yaar. I'll send him to college in the autumn. NASSER: (VO) He failed once. He has this chronic laziness that runs in our family except for me. PAPA: If his arse gets lazy - kick it. I'll send a certificate giving permission. And one more thing. Try and fix him up with a nice girl. I'm not sure if his penis is in full working order.

The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet’s life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrah from Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But Muhammad had in fact finally achieved victory by an ingenious policy of non-violence; the Quran adamantly opposed force and coercion in religious matters, and its vision—far from preaching exclusion and separation—was tolerant and inclusive. Qutb insisted that the Quranic injunction to toleration could occur only after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state. The new intransigence sprang from the profound fear that is at the core of fundamentalist religion. Qutb did not survive. At al-Nasser’s personal insistence, he was executed in 1966. Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology.

Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38

outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was not a result of some global strategy, but of a set of specific, regional calculations and miscalculations; on one hand, Israel’s long-standing wish to strike at the growing military power of Egypt and, on the other, the tactical mistakes of Nasser in May of that year, through which he requested the withdrawal of UN buffer forces and so left himself open to the Israeli attack.

But if Nasser's gift to the Egyptians was their sense of pride, Mubarak's curse is to have created a cultural climate where the only rewarded character traits are shameless opportunism and lack of dignity.

seemed to be turning Egypt from a poor and lethargic economy into an exemplary developmental case study. The country's economy grew at an average rate of 9 per cent per annum for almost a decade. The extent of cultivated land increased by almost a third (an achievement that had eluded Egyptians for more than a millennium); the contribution of manufacturing to GDP rose from around 14 per cent in the late 1940s to 35 per cent by the early 1970s.

Nasser's ‘Arabism’ was thus almost unprecedented in Egypt's long history. Nasser did not even invent Arab nationalism as a political identity. The easternists led the way towards the ‘Arabic East’. Michel Afleq, the Sorbonne-educated Arab Christian political philosopher who founded the Al-Baath (Rebirth) party in 1941, pioneered the call for an Arab political front.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, thousands of Egyptians were forced conscripts and paid fighters constituting the bulk of Iraq's 200,000 reservoir in its war with Iran. The ‘Egyptian fighter’ was also absent from the Arabs' most important struggle against Israel in the last thirty years: the Israeli–Hezbollah wars in southern Lebanon. Also, today, an Arab nationalist identity based on the old premise of an Egyptian leadership does not match the reality of the developmental state of Egyptian society relative to its supposed constituency (the Arab world).

Shame Law’ which gave the state wide powers to prosecute anyone ‘who threatens the values of the society’; the values were defined as ‘the genuine traditions of the Egyptian family’. The law also prosecuted those ‘who propagate views that are not in step with divine religions’.

economic situation in the 1970s and 1980s also supported the rise of the religious movement. Open economic policies that Sadat introduced in the mid-1970s (al-infitah) put enormous pressures on Egypt's middle class, which witnessed a significant erosion in its purchasing power and its relative standing in society (especially with the rise of segments of the country's lower classes that had significantly benefited from the economic consequences of the migration to the Gulf); the result was a damaging reshuffling in its composition (discussed in Chapter 4). These pressures in turn provided an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to re-establish its presence in Egyptian society.

Neither Mohamed Ali nor any of his descendants (up to King Fuad, who ascended to the throne in 1917) even spoke classical Arabic, let alone mastered the Egyptian variant (Turkish was the language of administration up to the second half of the nineteenth century, when a breed of Europe-educated Egyptian bureaucrats began to take leading roles in government agencies and ministries, and started to Arabize the the administrative system).

Tawfik Al-Hakeem, one of Egypt's most renowned twentieth-century writers, described Nasser as a ‘confused Sultan

Land reform was enacted through enforcing a 100-acre ceiling on the size of any single family's holding; ending absentee ownership; capping rent on leased lands; strengthening the legal rights of peasants (al-fellahin); and, crucially, confiscating hundreds of thousands of fertile acres from major landowners and distributing them to millions of landless peasants. Today, almost five decades later, the footage of Nasser distributing landownership titles to poor peasants in drab jalabeyas is still a powerful – and moving – symbol of the rise of the poor classes (Al-Tabaquat Al-Fakeera) and the transformation of a feudal system into one based on ‘equity and progress’.

Sadat, years later, commented that Nasser did not die on 28 September 1970 but on 5 June 1967 (the day the war broke out).

The hero, the historical giant, the dream, was revealed to be a mere inept leader presiding over a failing system. He trusted military commanders who proved to be incompetent and hopeless (King Hussein of Jordan once described Marshal Amer, the general commander of the Egyptian army in 1967, as ‘retarded’); the great leader rushed into a battle only to be trounced in less than a week. The Arab nationalist project lost its momentum and its appeal. No longer were Nasser's actions ‘historic’, no longer was ‘the nation moving on a generational stride towards victory’. Nasser became mortal: merely the president of a poor, third-world country that had been humiliatingly defeated in a war. For the first time ever, Egyptians rioted against Nasser; in March 1968, thousands of university students took to the streets to condemn what they saw as lenient verdicts on the military leaders ‘responsible for the 1967 setback’, and later in the same year, workers in different factories held strikes against the regime.

Some of the key pillars of Nasser's project proved greatly lacking. The public sector evolved into a Soviet-style system of sterile thinking, a deathbed for talent, a site of mediocre resource allocation, inefficiency, suffocating bureaucracy, waste and decrepit management; in no way could it support lasting economic development in the country. Many of Nasser's detractors argue that land reform precipitated a dramatic retreat of Egyptian agribusiness: that the replacement of sophisticated, well-capitalized large landowners by low-skilled and poor peasants resulted in lower quality products, no concern for the long-term subsistence of the land, poor marketing of strategic Egyptian crops such as cotton and a continued erosion of links to

In Al-Karnak, an Egyptian film produced in the mid-1970s, the leading Egyptian actress Souad Hosni brilliantly exposed what a broken soul would look like, after her character – an aspiring postgraduate student – was humiliated, tortured and raped in ‘Nasser's prisons’.

Arab revolts

At that time, a grand Arabic project emanating from Cairo had credibility. That is not true today. The relative standing of Egyptians (the country, the people and the culture) in the Arabic milieu has significantly declined. The major socio-economic challenges that ordinary Egyptians have struggled with for thirty-five years have exacted their price on the country's living standards, income levels, educational quality, as well as on the people's skills, aptitudes, behaviours and attitudes. Such deterioration was taking place while many Arab countries, especially in the Gulf (but also in the Levant), were improving their indices in all these areas.

Unlike political Islamism, Arab nationalism has no major following on the Egyptian streets. Unlike liberal capitalism, it lacks the resources and the might of the country's ultra-rich to impose itself on society. Nasserite Arab nationalism, failing to reinvent itself, could well become irrelevant as a result of the impending fight between political Islamism and liberal cap italism over the hearts and minds of young Egyptians.

The politics of the 1970s were the second factor in this social shift. In his efforts to confront the Nasserite and socialist forces in Egypt, President Anwar Sadat unleashed Egypt's Islamic forces. He released thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders and members from jail (after years of imprisonment and prosecution under Nasser), and allowed the Brotherhood's old newspaper the Call (Al-Dawaa) to be reissued. He tried to assume the mantle of Islam by calling himself ‘the guardian of the faith’; emphasized that his first name was ‘Mohamed’ not ‘Anwar’; promoted religious schools; authorized a major increase in the budget of Al-Azhar and an expansion of its parallel educational system; opened the door for leading religious scholars and commentators to dominate the state-controlled media; introduced apostasy laws in Egypt after years of a highly liberal intellectual atmosphere; declared sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence) as the principal source for the Egyptian constitution (after decades during which religion was generally marginal to legislation with the exception of personal status laws); and declared himself the leader of ‘an Islamic pious country’.

since ancient times, the people of Egypt have been expert in deceit and treachery’, he said, before recommending a ruthless campaign in the country.

(Ibrahim Pasha captured and flattened the Saudis' capital of Diraiyah – now a suburb of Riyadh, arrested the Saudi emir Abdullah Ibn Saud and sent him to Istanbul, where he was beheaded).

The Alexandria Bourse (the fourth largest worldwide) and the Cairo stock exchange were sizable, international markets. In fact, the story of the Alexandria Bourse – or the Alexandria Futures Exchange – is an interesting representation of Egyptian society's capitalism – and cosmopolitanism – in the first half of the twentieth century; the Bourse's board of directors included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Egyptians in addition to Egyptianized foreigners who had settled in the country.

theatre, pioneering artists such as Fatima Rouschdie and Naguib Al-Rihani introduced popular comedies as well as melodramas (Al-Rihani 1889–1948, ‘the father of Egyptian comedy’, worked with his lifelong friend Badeih Khairy on Egyptianizing a number of French theatre hits and presenting them in Egyptian theatre, and later cinema). Egyptian cinema, introduced in the early 1920s by Italians and Armenians living in Egypt, was boosted by the creation of Studio Misr (under the patronage of Talaat Harb Pasha, the era's most prominent capitalist).

A number of the coup's leaders, including Nasser, had relationships with the Brotherhood. Some (but not Nasser) actually ‘swore on the Koran and the sword’ (pleaded allegiance to the group). But neither the Brotherhood's political nor its military leadership had any command of the group of officers who led the coup in July 1952.

anger sweeping society expressed itself in significantly rising crime rates and everyday violence.26

Ibn Taimiyah spent years hunting down any philosophical interpretation that appeared to deviate from the literalist, ‘clear’ interpretation of the Koran. He was especially scathing of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who, in earlier ages, had produced some of the most creative and refreshing insights in Islamic thought. Ibn Taimiyah's most famous book, Politics in the Name of Divine Rule for Establishing Good Order in the Affairs of the Shepherd and the Flock, called for strict imposition of the Sharia, set out the literalist interpretation of the Koran as the sole source and measure of law and rule, and criminalized the separation of power and authority from religious rule and jihad. Ibn Taimiyah's ideas had featured regularly, not only in Sayyid Qutb's writings, but in those of other jihadist theorists as well.

In general, the liberal experiment seemed to have failed to put forward a development programme for the country's poor, who continued to constitute more than 80 per cent of the entire population.34

The Islamic movement in Egypt, from the late 1970s, managed to occupy the political space in the country that had been the domain of Nasserite Arab nationalism, and to monopolize the representation of the country's middle class.

Al-Sharaawi's fatwa that ‘humans do not own their bodies’ – and hence his prohibition of organ-transplant operations – was a key factor behind the Egyptian parliament's repeated blocking of legislation on the issue. His influence extended even to Egyptian cinema; he was one of the architects of the ‘religious wave’ among actresses in the 1990s who chose to shun the art, dropping out of the film business and ‘reverting to God’ as born-again Muslims.

Even colloquial Egyptian changed: ‘Good morning’ (‘Naharak Saeed’) and ‘Good evening’ (‘masaa al-kheir’) were replaced by ‘peace be upon you’, Islam's greeting (‘al-salamu aleikom’).

he did revive the thinking of two respectable (if rejectionist) Islamic thinkers of mediaeval times, Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taimiyah, and used their ideas as a focus for contemporary criticism of ‘modernity and Westernization’.

Whereas in 1800 at least 90 per cent of Egyptians were poor peasants, by 1900 more than 25 per cent of the population of 10 million lived in Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta's main cities, and could be counted as lower middle class or working class.11 The economy was by and large in the hands of the royal family, its Turkish-Albanian-European entourage and the thousands of foreigners who had settled in Egypt from the mid- and late-nineteenth century; yet Egyptians, and especially the increasingly influential landowners, were rapidly climbing the political and socio-economic ladder.

Believing that Egypt's future lay with the Levant, Iraq, Iran and the Arabian peninsula, the easternists sought to establish strong relationships with the rising Saudi family, accommodated the Hashemites (in Jordan and Iraq), established through marriage a political alliance with Iran,20 and sponsored attempts to formulate an Arabic political forum (which evolved, in 1945, into the League of Arab States).

Such criticism grew in the later 1970s, as the immediate post-Nasser years gave way to the period of economic opening up (al-infitah) under Anwar Sadat, and the entire Nasserite project was assailed as a failure rooted in a lack of dynamism. If anything the exact opposite was true. Nasser's development programme was frenetically action-oriented as well as rich in rhetoric. In the space of a few years following the July 1952 coup that abolished Egyptian monarchism, Nasser overhauled Egypt's entire political system; sidelined the political class that had ruled Egypt for half a century, replacing the Turco-dominated aristocracy with ordinary Egyptians, who at least in theory represented the will and aspirations of the masses; emasculated all political parties; tried (and in many cases imprisoned) most of the key politicians of the ‘bygone era’; created a new constitutional order; and established a new system based on an ultra-powerful presidency supported by an executive government, the legitimacy of which was derived from the consent (albeit without formal electoral channels) of the people.

The combination of the land-reform programme and the creation of the public sector resulted in around 75 per cent of Egypt's gross domestic product (GDP) being transferred from the hands of the country's rich either to the state or to millions of small owners. The closest parallel to such a large-scale social programme had been in the early days of Mohamed Ali Pasha's rule in the early nineteenth century.

Voice of the Arabs (Sout Al-Arab), Nasser's far-reaching radio station, became a propagandist vehicle par excellence, conveying the leader's fiery speeches to the Arab world from ‘the Ocean to the Gulf’; even Egyptian cinema and music were mobil ized to market the notion of the ‘rising Arab nation’ led by its ‘historical leader’. A new adaptation of the Saladin story was made into a smash-hit film, in which the Kurdish leader who fought the Christian Crusaders in the name of Islam was transformed into ‘the servant and the leader of the Arabs fighting the invading Westerners’.

after challenging France by arming and bankrolling the Algerian revolutionaries, he had the courage to send thousands of his troops to Yemen, on the Saudi borders, to support the revolutionaries in their coup against the country's antiquated royal regime. Nasser's project appeared to be a true revolutionary avalanche. Syria begged to unite with Egypt under his leadership. The Syrian leadership accepted union terms with Egypt that in effect dissolved the Syrian state. Several Iraqi leaders invited him to Baghdad to announce Iraq's inclusion in the ‘United Arab Republic’. Lebanon's Muslims and Druze hailed him as their leader.

Cairo itself was founded under their rule in 969, as was Al-Azhar (whose name is derived from that of Al-Zahraa). The dynasty also inaugurated a large number of religious and social festivals, the most notable of which venerate Ahl Al-Bayt (Prophet Mohamed's descendants) and commemorate Al-Mwaled

Paris on the Nile’ or the ‘finery of Cairo’, Al-Ismailiya – a district to which Ismael gave his name – comprised large, wide avenues, piazzas, belle époque buildings and urban public gardens.8 He brought steam shipping to the Nile, which revolutionized internal trading. He was a major patron of the arts and created the Cairo Opera House, another architectural jewel. He founded Dar-Al-Kuttub (the National Library), an ambitious project that started with more than 250,000 volumes, most of which were gathered from Egyptian, Levantine, Turkish and European collections, and which grew to become the region's largest library and one of the cultural treasures of the world.

country's middle class was growing at a very slow pace. By the late 1940s, around 5 per cent of the population controlled more than 65 per cent of the country's asset base (private companies and traded stocks); more than 20 per cent of all Egyptian peasants were landless while around 3 per cent of the population held around 80 per cent of all cultivated land; and foreigners continued to exert dramatic influence on the economy.

vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.

With the sole exception of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, every single invasion the country witnessed in its history had come from the East. Sinai, throughout thousands of years, has been the invaders' route into the country.

The speed of these social changes outpaced the development of Egyptian society and the people. Land reform and asset nationalization resulted in a far more equitable land and asset distribution across the economy, but the new owners and managers were hardly on a par with the grand objectives of the developmental endeavour they were leading;

the expansionist Wahhabi project found fertile ground in Egypt. Three indigenous factors contributed to its favourable reception. First, between 1974 and 1985, more than 3 million Egyptians migrated to the Gulf, with the majority settling in Saudi Arabia. Most of them hailed from Egypt's lower (and lower middle) classes, and had had limited exposure to Egypt's old glamour. In part as a result, they quickly absorbed the cultures of their new home; and more slowly, the dominant social and cultural milieu of the Gulf's most austere centre found its way to Egypt's Delta and Saeedi villages, and later to the heart of Cairo and Alexandria.

The change can be measured in the increase in the proportion of women in Egypt wearing the veil, from less than 30 per cent to more than 65 per cent in two decades; by the early 1990s, the veil was established as the dress code on the Egyptian street rather than as an occasional choice. In the less-privileged villages of the Nile Delta, as well as in Cairo's and Alexandria's poorest neighbourhoods, the veil became the natural step for girls as young as twelve.5 There was also a general shift in the socially preferred pattern of gender roles, with the return to an emphasis on men's public role and women's domesticity.6

Some (but not Nasser) actually ‘swore on the Koran and the sword’ (pleaded allegiance to the group). But neither the Brotherhood's political nor its military leadership had any command of the group of officers who led the coup in July 1952.

the factor that really cemented the Brotherhood's social re-emergence, and founded the Islamic movement's social base, was its highly efficient services infrastructure.

Rather, the society was wide open to popular Western culture at the very time when it was being drawn towards conservatism and increased religiosity. The Cairene and Alexandrian middle-class family would watch the afternoon lesson of Sheikh Al-Sharaawi only to switch channels later to watch the evening episode of Dallas or Dynasty, and later Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives. As large segments of society became participants in the new consumerist waves,13 they were also presented with archaic, debilitated views of ‘a return to Islam’.

Egyptian mujahideen had a rich experience in Afghanistan. Thousands of young Egyptian men lived in Al-Sindh and the Punjab regions, and among populations that cut through Pakistan and Afghanistan.

most intellectually intriguing episode in Ibn Hanbal's life was his fierce struggle with Al-Mutazillah, an isolationist school of Islamic philosophy that flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries in parts of Iraq and the Levant and which started with advocating the primacy of reasoning over tradition in interpreting the Koran and progressed into elaborate beliefs on the nature of God and the Koran that were very different from those of the Sunnis and the Shiis.

The story of Ayman Al-Zawahiri (head of Al-Qaeda following Osama bin Laden's killing in May 2011), his transform ation from a successful surgeon to a leader of a violent group, bent on the murder of thousands, is a perfect example of the radicalization of segments of the Egyptian middle class.

The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.

regime also imposed a further restriction on religious parties (and independent parliamentary candidates), namely an amendment of Articles 1 and 2 of the constitution to define Egypt as ‘a state of citizenship’ and remove the reference to Islam as ‘the religion of the state’. The change in theory would have the effect of allowing women, and Christians, to run for any position, including the presidency.

There was a major demographic boom in Egypt from the 1980s, in which the population almost doubled from around 45 million to 80 million, but there was also a notable increase in literacy and urbanization. The literacy rate in Egypt increased from around 45 per cent in the early 1970s to 65 per cent in the early 2000s,

the mid-2000s, Islamic banks operating in Egypt controlled around 10 per cent of the commercial deposits in the country's banking system; and a number of the world's leading banks (from Citigroup to HSBC) were heavily promoting their ‘Islamic arms’.