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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

تكون المرأه فاتنه عندما لا تعرف شيئاً عن جمالها .

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

فيه حاجات علشان مضمونة فَ بننسى إنها موجودة فيه حاجات علشان قُدامنا فَ عينينا مابتشوفهاش دايما بنحس بقيمة الشئ لو راح وماجاش مصطفى ناصر ... غير كل اللى فات ...

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

Awareness of your weakness is the first step for correction

خُلِقَ الانسان، ليزيد الطينَ بلة!

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

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.

That same month, Arab honor died too, or so it felt for millions across the region, who watched, incredulously, as Nasser’s successor, president Anwar Sadat, crossed enemy lines and traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Tears streamed down the faces of children as rage burned inside the hearts of men. How could Egypt break rank and betray the Arab and Palestinian cause?

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.

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.

Where are the faces that somehow imprinted their features on your memory for ever, and the faces whose details have been erased and whose ghostly passage across the screen of your memory keeps you awake at night? Where are the smells that mysteriously preserve the images and feelings you secretly treasure? Where are the pavements, the cold, life when it became just a lucky coincidence, the skies as low as a wall of grey, the long sleepless nights, the cough, the stubborn hopes, the dancing lights of return?

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

Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. thing, for one chance— Parisa tousled her hair, switching her part from one side to the other. She didn’t have a bad side. —but I’m done being grateful! I’m done trying to make myself suitable for this family, for this God, for this life. I’m done being small, I’ve outgrown the person who needed you to save her, I don’t even know who she is anymore— She pouted at the mirror and started again, pinching her cheeks to see the color come and go. —and I want more, so much more— Lip balm. Mascara. Lips softer, eyes wider, be something different, something else. —I just want to live, Nas! Just let me live! What was the point of reliving the past? She was hunting her invisible nemeses, grappling for power, finding new methods of control. She should be busy, too busy being the most dangerous person in this or any world to think about why she’d been such an easy target for Atlas Blakely, a man in need of weapons just to make a universe that he could stand. But now— Now she was thinking about Nasser, as if it mattered at all what kind of person she’d been over a decade ago. Just an hour of your time, now and then. That’s all I ask. I know, I know, I’m asking a lot more from you inside my head, but that’s not fair—doesn’t it matter what I choose to put in front of you? Someday maybe you’ll understand that there’s a difference between what a person thinks and who they choose to be— A glint caught her eye from her reflection. A brief, unnatural sparkle in the placid lake of her appearance, the consistency of her beauty, the easy grace she always wore. She leaned forward, forgetting her internal monologue, letting it collapse. Someday the view will be different, eshgh, and I hope you see me in a softer light— “Parisa?” Dalton leaned against the frame of the bathroom door. In his left hand was one of her dresses. In his right hand was her phone. “I don’t care if you want to see your husband. Sorry—Nasser. If you want me to call him that, I will. I suppose you’re right, anyway, you’ll need to see him, because if the Society could find evidence of him in your past then the Forum surely can as well, and so can Atlas. And so can anyone else who wants you dead.” Another pause as Dalton set her phone back on the bathroom counter. “I replied to the physicist for you as well. I think you’ll need to find out what he plans to do about the archives, or at least keep track of what Atlas is doing at the house. Atlas is going to win over both the physicists unless you can convince one of them to do it differently. “What is it?” Dalton asked, frowning at her silence. His gaze traced the placement of her fingers, which had been parsing the thickness of her hair. “I—” Parisa was caught somewhere between laughing and crying. “I found a gray hair.” “So?” Laughter, definitely laughter. It escaped her in something of a rueful bray. Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. “Nothing.” Only the future loss of her desirability, the collapse of her personhood. The first glimpse of an empire steadily falling to unseen ruin. The fate she already knew was coming, the punishment she’d always known she deserved. What timing!

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

By the time the operation was over, thirty-eight Egyptians and eight Israelis had been killed. Militarily the operation had been a success. The IDF had achieved its objectives, inflicting heavy damage on Egyptian infrastructure and personnel. Israel’s leadership hoped that the harsh reprisal would convince Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser to rein in the fedayeen. Instead, Nasser was humiliated. Viewing the raid as a disaster, Nasser decided to take drastic measures. In September 1955 Egypt and Czechoslovakia announced a massive arms deal, including three hundred tanks, two hundred fighter planes, fifty bombers, artillery, naval equipment, and other weapons.

The Suez Canal was a vital British interest. Moreover, Nasser was supporting Algerian rebels in their fight against France. The two European powers decided that military action was the only solution. They needed a regional ally—one that was also threatened by Egypt. Israel fit the bill. France began supplying Israel with the arms, tanks, armored vehicles, and planes it needed to counter the growing Egyptian menace. Meanwhile, the situation along the Egyptian border worsened, as waves of fedayeen continued to kill civilians while Egyptian artillery struck into Israel.

was rewarded by a quick slap, and because it felt good, he slapped her

I would have been dead now, but the camera is the only weapon I have.

I conceived the idea from my personal everyday experience, so what's better than to capture myself in the perfect mood.

I feel like flying when I take my drone out into the desert or over the tall skyscrapers in the UAE (Dubai) to capture beautiful imagery.

a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.

One of the most productive, cultured and creative Jewish communities in the world was almost at an end. President Nasser then ordered Egyptian Jewry’s contribution to the life and prosperity of modern Egypt to be erased from all Egyptian history books.14

Secret agreements between the Saudis and various U.S. presidents dated back to the early postwar era and continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a pact between President Harry Truman and King Ibn Saud in 1947, the United States vowed to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it was attacked. Likewise, in 1963, President Kennedy sent a squadron of fighter jets to protect Saudi Arabia when Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to kill members of the Saudi royal family.

رواية مرايا الرّوح لــ: محمود حرشاني *** أهداني الإعلاميّ الكبير محمود حرشاني إصدارا جديدا له يتمثّل في نصّ روائيّ يحمل عنوان - مرايا الرّوح – وهذا الإصدار هو واحد في سلسلة من العناوين الّتي نشرها محمود الحرشاني على مدى سنوات طويلة من ممارسة الثّقافة والإعلام والأدب جعلت منه أحد أقطاب الإعلام الجهويّ وكذلك على صعيد الوطن والعالم العربيّ. مرايا الرّوح رحلة في زمن مضى اتّسم بالصّراع المرير في دنيا الفكر والصحافة وهو صراع فيه الكثير من الإحباطات والنّجاحات لكنّه اتّسم بالإصرار على الإبداع والتحدّي والمواجهة فكان التميّز على كلّ الأصعدة بشهادة الجميع. شكرا للأستاذ محمود الحرشاني على هذه الهديّة الثّمينة. #عبد_القادر_بن_الحاج_نصر #مكتبة

Hussein told Herzog that Israel should not have taken Nasser’s declarations to heart, and, like Herzog, he proceeded to deliver an analysis of his own people’s mentality: “With the Arabs, words don’t have the same value as they do for other people. Threats mean nothing.” For many years, this had been one of the great failings of the Arabs: they confused words with intentions and acts.

When the young General Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup against King Farouk in July 1952, he turned to the Germans who had been training his erstwhile enemy’s forces to create his own intelligence and security network in order to consolidate power. Seamlessly shifting their allegiance from King Farouk, the German detachment set about their new task, still with the backing of the CIA and Gehlen Org. The training was led by Otto Skorzeny, a notorious ex-Nazi who had been part of an elite unit that helped Mussolini escape from Allied jails during the war.

Profitant de la crédulité de la population rurale, les agents du FLN firent circuler de fausses rumeurs : « Les avions de Nasser ont tué des milliers de soldats français ici et là » ; « Des volontaires russes (ou chinois) sont déjà en Tunisie » ; « Dans les écoles, les Français mettent du poison dans le lait qu’ils donnent à nos garçons pour les rendre impuissants. 

«Quando il presidente Gamal Abdel Nasser, alla metà degli anni Cinquanta, espulse i leader dei Fratelli Musulmani, questi si rifugiarono in Qatar»,

It was not the first time he had woken up like this, and according to his doctors, he was going to experience more of the same for a very long time.

He could feel his heartbeat slow, and he knew that in a few more minutes, the effects of the pills would quickly kick in.

As he had parked in the driveway, he had taken in the two- story Colonial with a deep sense of nostalgia that had had him aching for a time when the world had made a lot more sense.

I want my Allison. That is all I ask. I do not believe I ask for much.

He had to squeeze his eyes shut against the vertigo, careful not to keep them closed for too long lest the nightmares he had been experiencing found their way into the waking world.

It reminded him of the ocean, how the horizon formed a line where sky and water kissed.

We may ignore a lot of the uncomfortable conversations and subjects in the South, but one thing we do not ignore is the value of food as a binding source of love and friendship.

On 19 July 1956, Secretary of State Dulles abruptly announced that the United States was rescinding its Aswan Dam financing offer. ‘May you choke to death on your fury’, a defiant Nasser railed at the United States. World Bank President Eugene Black warned Dulles that ‘all hell might break loose’.

Though the timing of Dulles’s decision may have been ordained by his domestic political situation, it was a shock to his colleagues and allies. “The secretary of state has gone mad!” exclaimed Miles Copeland, one of the key CIA agents dealing with Egypt. He predicted Nasser would react violently

Do not say it is the appointed time. Do not say it’s preordained. Do not say there is a wisdom that our myopic eyes cannot see. After arriving here I no longer believe that. There is chaos in the ranks of those waiting before the heavenly archive. They do not know why they are here. This is not the time of those horrified children who cling to their mothers’ dresses. For they had time, but someone decided that it should be the time. It was not God. Nor the Angel of death. Do not add to his already heavy load.

How could a poet less than twenty years old describe how time weighed on his shoulders, how it had left scars on his body, how it made the ground sprout lily after lily and the gazelles give birth to gazelle after gazelle, and the days and nights pass in succession without his love for his beloved diminishing one iota? You told yourself that sometimes one’s words can sing the praises of something you know nothing about or overestimate the permanence of feelings. They can immortalise a moment that soon proves to be transitory, if not pathetic. You also said that it is emotional and intellectual discipline that generally gives words a way out, saves them from the nonsense of their firm promises and makes it possible to read them again with as little disgust as possible.

At night it was a different matter. The whole night was his, the night when his cough and his insomnia never failed to start on time, along with the random disconnected images that crossed his mind. No one can stop the machine of memory from working. Nothing has been invented, as far as he knows, that can tame memory, make it work on demand. Even I, with my few exaggerated memories, cannot fend off attacks by the most unpleasant of them.

After that fateful day of July 23, 1952, the "Paris Along the Nile," as Cairo was lovingly renamed by the foreigners who flocked to the city and helped to design, build, and run it during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was cast into the proverbial dustbin of history. Quarrels rather than friendships between Egyptians and foreigners became the order of the day. Indeed, the foreigners' property was confiscated. Along with the aristocracy itself, they eventually either chose to leave or, after the 1956 Suez War, were forced to flee. Symbolic of Nasser's rank xenophobia was his expulsion of half of Egypt's Jews, endlessly linked in the regime propaganda machine with the recently created state of Israel. This was one of a number of witch hunts Nasser used (another targeting the Muslim Brotherhood) to deflect attention from his own shortcomings, especially in the area of foreign policy.

Nasser's coup got rid of everything that was good in Egypt, and slowly replaced everything that was bad with something much worse.

But in 1954 the organization was banned, then almost annihilated by Nasser. He claimed they tried to assassinate him while he delivered a public speech in October that year in Alexandria, the shots heard live on Egyptian radio. The Brothers denied any involvement in the events of that day. Nasser, it should be noted, was not beyond conjuring up such spectacular crises to shore up his domestic support—having likely arranged, for instance, the bombing of the landmark coffee shop Groppi's in the heart of downtown Cairo in a bid to create instability at the height of his power struggle with the first figurehead leader of the republic.

Egypt nevertheless remained socially liberal until the 1970s, when Nasser’s successor, Anwar Al-Sadat, brought the rank-and-file of the Muslim Brotherhood back from exile (they had mostly decamped to Saudi Arabia) and used them to counter the influence of the leftists, who had organized in protest at Nasser’s increasingly despotic rule. During that decade, and throughout the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism therefore grew in influence in Egypt, and “belly-dancing nightclubs were torched and dancers were barred from television.”36 Today, dancers are free to perform in Cairo’s city center, but they must cover their navels or risk fines or arrest.

in retrospect Nasser's pan-Arabism seems to have given Arabs little to celebrate, it is certain nothing good can come from the Arab world as long as the fanatical Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia are in control. For Egypt, the results of the spread of Wahhabism are already evident. As we have seen, the condemnation by a minority of Wahhabi-inspired zealots of popular moulids as un-Islamic is one. The singling out for discrimination and violence of Egypt's Christian minority, also damned as infidels by Wahhabi doctrine, is another.

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.

every fork in the road Nasser went left, Al-Sadat went right, and Mubarak says, "Don't move.

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. . . American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. . . At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. . .It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. . . Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

Nasser taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.

Back in Egypt, Nasser, like a petty village leader, promoted his cronies according to their personal loyalty rather than on their merits. Abdel Hakim Amer is the most infamous example. Made Egypt's chief of staff and subsequently Nasser's first vice president, Amer proved incompetent beyond measure. Nasser got rid of him only after his military advice, based on fanciful speculation and an eternal eagerness to please his old friend rather than risk offending him by bringing home ugly truths, led Egypt to defeat in 1967.

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.

Luxor attack in 1997 in which Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya killed fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians outside a pharaonic temple. In the same year, an ambush near the Egyptian museum in downtown Cairo by the group took the lives of nine tourists. In 1995, eighteen Greek tourists had been killed close to the Pyramids. But the violence was not only directed at the ‘infidel Westerners’ (though they, and the tourism industry, were especially prized victims). Egyptians also suffered: between 1982 and 2000, more than 2,000 Egyptians died in terror attacks – from the speaker of parliament to a number of secular writers and commentators (for example, Farag Foda, a prominent and controversial writer, was assassinated in 1992, and in 1994 an assassination attempt was made against Egypt's Nobel Literature Laureate Naguib Mahfouz), to a series of senior police officers,39 and children caught up in the blasts.

Khaled Yousef's Hina Maysara a voyeuristic, smash-hit film, produced in 2007, recounts of the story of Cairene slums – such as Imbaba – in which religious extremism blurred with aggression, drug use, child labour and abuse, the grey economy and prostitution.

Between 1991 and 1993, the militants had virtually taken complete control of Imbaba, replacing the government as the social arbiter. The situation reached a climax in 1992 when the security forces decided to intervene. More than 12,000 troops in more than 100 armed cars descended on the neighbourhood (home to more than a million Cairenes) and sealed it off; by the end of a bloody, tense day,

the Luxor attack (the latter widely reported in the West as a serious indication of a regime unable to assert its control over the country and contain the threat), the Egyptian security forces launched a comprehensive campaign against the key militant groups in (and outside) the country: infiltrating the most important, targeting their key leaders, taking control of thousands of mosques, squeezing their financial sources, draining the weapons sources (especially in Al-Saeed) and stepping up the internal pressure with a series of arrests. In a very intelligent move, the government diverted the payment of Islamic alms (zakat) from the local committees and charities that traditionally had allocated it to government-controlled banks, depleting one of their key sources of internal funding.

regime had handled the military threat successfully.41 But the rise of Islamism as a social force was a different story.

Brotherhood extended its social reach and infrastructure into a much more developed political platform. In the late 1990s, the traditionally vague Muslim Brotherhood proposed a draft political manifesto, seen by many observers as the skeleton of an alternative constitution. It championed political reform, increased freedom and fair elections, all in the language of Egyptian political activism. The Brotherhood, for the first time since its rehabilitation in Egyptian politics, was positioning itself as a direct political competitor to the regime that had ruled Egypt since 1952. This became abundantly clear in the

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.

1923 constitution. The committee, which comprised five Christians, one Jew and six Muslims, instituted Article 1 (that Islam is the religion of the state) unanimously. And interestingly the five Christian committee members were the ones who rejected a clause, suggested by a Muslim, to have a minimum number of parliamentary seats and ministerial posts reserved for Christians. ‘It would be a shame for Egyptian Christians to be appointed, not elected,’ commented one of the Christian committee members. That was the era when a Christian politician such as Makram Ebeid Pasha, the legendary general secretary of Al-Wafd, was elected for six consecutive terms to the parliament in a constituency with virtually no Christians. Sadly, those were different times.46 In another incident following its 2005 electoral success,

Al-Azhar had over several decades lost part of its authoritative intellectual firepower. Several notable theologians emerged in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Sunni world) who had been trained by Al-Azhar yet later broke away from the institution's structure and became independent. Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is the most prominent of these.

Amr Khaled, the most successful of those young sheikhs,