Gamal Abdel Nasser

Gamal Abdel Nasser was an Egyptian army officer who helped overthrow the monarchy in 1952 and ruled Egypt as prime minister and then president from 1954 until his death in 1970. His nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 and his defiance of Britain and France made him the leading voice of Arab nationalism and a hero across much of the Arab world and the decolonising countries. At home he built an authoritarian one-party state with sweeping social and economic reforms, and his reputation was badly damaged by Egypt's defeat by Israel in 1967.

Nasser was born on 15 January 1918 in Alexandria, the eldest son of a post office clerk from a village in Upper Egypt. His father's postings meant that he grew up in several towns, and he lived for some years with an uncle in Cairo. His mother died when he was eight. Egypt was then formally independent but dominated by Britain, which kept troops along the Suez Canal, and as a schoolboy Nasser took part in nationalist demonstrations, being slightly wounded by police in 1935.

He entered the Royal Military Academy in 1937, when it first opened to young men without aristocratic connections, and was commissioned in 1938. Among his fellow officers were Anwar Sadat and Abdel Hakim Amer, later two of his closest associates.

Nasser fought in the Arab–Israeli war of 1948, when Egypt and other Arab states sent armies against the newly declared state of Israel. He was wounded, and was among the Egyptian troops besieged for months in the Faluja pocket. He blamed the defeat on the incompetence and corruption of King Farouk's regime, and on his return organised a secret network within the army, the Free Officers.

On 23 July 1952 the Free Officers seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Farouk abdicated and left the country, and in 1953 Egypt was declared a republic. The popular General Muhammad Naguib became the public face of the new regime, but real power lay with Nasser and the Revolutionary Command Council. A land reform broke up the great estates, political parties were dissolved, and in 1954 Nasser pushed Naguib aside and became prime minister. In October 1954, after a member of the Muslim Brotherhood fired shots at him during a speech in Alexandria, he used the attack to crush the Brotherhood, imprisoning thousands of its members. The same year he signed an agreement for the withdrawal of British troops from the Canal Zone.

Nasser became a leading figure among the newly independent states at the Bandung conference in 1955, and bought weapons from the Soviet bloc after the West refused his terms. He was elected president in June 1956. When the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, he nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, saying the canal's revenues would pay for the dam.

In October 1956 Israel invaded Sinai, and Britain and France, by secret agreement with Israel, bombed Egyptian airfields and landed troops at Port Said, claiming to separate the two sides. Militarily Egypt was beaten, but under strong pressure from the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower and threats from the Soviet Union, the invaders withdrew. Nasser kept the canal and emerged as the most admired leader in the Arab world, while the crisis marked the decline of British and French power in the Middle East. The Soviet Union then helped build the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970.

At the height of his prestige, in February 1958, Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic, with Nasser as president, in the hope that other Arab states would follow. Syrian resentment of Egyptian control led to a military coup in Damascus and Syria's secession in 1961. The same year Nasser nationalised banks, industry and large businesses, turning to what he called Arab socialism. Education was expanded and made free, industrialisation was pursued with Soviet help, and a single party, the Arab Socialist Union, was created in 1962.

Nasser ruled through the army and the security services. Communists, the Brotherhood and liberal opponents were imprisoned and many were tortured, the press was brought under state control, and in 1966 the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb was executed. Abroad, he backed nationalist movements against colonial rule in Africa and the Arab world, helped found the Non-Aligned Movement alongside Josip Broz Tito and Jawaharlal Nehru, and from 1962 sent tens of thousands of troops to support the republicans in the civil war in Yemen, a costly commitment that lasted five years.

In May 1967, amid tension with Israel and false Soviet reports of Israeli troop concentrations on the Syrian border, Nasser moved forces into Sinai, had United Nations peacekeepers withdrawn, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On 5 June Israel launched a surprise air attack that destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground, and in six days took Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. On 9 June Nasser announced his resignation on television, but withdrew it the next day after huge demonstrations in his support. Amer, the army commander, was arrested and died in custody in an apparent suicide.

Nasser rebuilt the army with Soviet help and fought a war of attrition with Israel along the Suez Canal from 1969 to 1970, until a ceasefire was agreed. He also allowed limited political changes after student and worker protests in 1968. In September 1970 he chaired an emergency Arab summit in Cairo that ended the fighting in Jordan between the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas. On 28 September 1970, the day after the summit closed, he died of a heart attack, aged 52. Millions of people followed his funeral in Cairo. Sadat succeeded him and soon moved Egypt away from his policies.

Nasser remains a central figure in the history of the modern Middle East. Admirers remember him for ending British domination and the monarchy, standing up to the former colonial powers at Suez, and giving ordinary Egyptians land, schooling and a sense of national dignity. Critics stress the police state he created, the suppression of political freedom, the economic costs of state control and of the war in Yemen, and the catastrophic miscalculation of 1967. His model of a military-backed, nationalist one-party state influenced many regimes in the Arab world, including those in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and the army has remained at the centre of Egyptian politics ever since.