Why Egypt failed with Nasser and why it continues to fail without him

In his book “Egypt,” published nine years ago on the eve of the 2018 presidential elections, academic and Arab affairs specialist Robert Springborg outlined three potential trajectories for the country’s future.

The first was an optimistic scenario that has since been overtaken by events. The second depended on either Lt. Gen. Sami Anan or Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shafik running for president, betting on their willingness to ally with civilian reformers inside state institutions—figures such as anti-corruption crusader and former judge Hesham Genena. That alliance would have left the door open to rebuild cohesion in an Egyptian society fractured by secular-Islamist identity conflicts and civil-military friction, paving the way for serious economic reform.

The third scenario did not rule out state collapse along the lines of Syria, Libya, or Yemen—the cumulative outcome of compounding economic failure, systemic poverty, escalating repression, and institutions eroded by corruption. It ended in a desperate eruption of the impoverished and hungry, reviving deep structural divisions woven into the country over centuries.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi likely disagrees with Springborg on many points. Yet years before the book was even published, he made a regular habit of warning Egyptians against that very third scenario. Springborg himself seemed to tip his hand toward this bleak prognosis by choosing for the book’s cover the elegant bust of Nefertiti in a state of visible erosion.

Regrettably, Egypt’s failure is chronic. While failing officials routinely summon the glories of Pharaonic antiquity to indulge in national daydreams, that era ended three centuries before the Common Era. Yet, as Sobhi Wahida reminds us in “On the Origins of the Egyptian Question,” there was a time when Amun was venerated in Greece, and Isis in Rome.

Comatose in the Mamluk-Ottoman cave

Following an extended interlude of transitions from the Pharaonic era to the Ptolemaic and then the Coptic, the Arab conquest established the conquerors' language as the tongue of the Egyptians. Other peoples who embraced Islam did not abandon their native languages—including the Persians, Ottoman Turks, Kurds, and Amazigh, as well as various Asian and African groups. Throughout this period, Wahida observes, the rule of Egypt passed from declining empires to rising ones: “The Arabs surrendered it to the North Africans, the North Africans to the Kurds, the Kurds to the Mamluks, and the Mamluks to the Ottomans.”

Those captivated by the myth of the “purity of the Egyptian race” would do well to recall that, from the close of the Pharaonic era onward, Egypt absorbed three massive waves of migration: Greek, Arab, and Mongol-Turkic—the latter encompassing Kurdish, Circassian, and Turkish branches. Perhaps this history best explains why Egypt is so often called the “Mother of the World.”

Geographically, Egypt is in Africa. Yet as the writer Anwar El-Hawary observed in his daily column in the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Asian legacy came to dominate the deepest recesses of the Egyptian spirit. That shift consolidated after Arab rule ended in 1171, ushering in eight centuries of Asian dynastic hegemony. Under the Ottomans, whose rule began with the 1517 invasion and lasted three centuries, “Turkish prevailed in Egypt, not Arabic,” notes Wahida.

In their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson describe how the Ottomans drained the economies of conquered territories, levying taxes that claimed one-half to two-thirds of all agricultural yields.

Three centuries before the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, the King of England had already been forced by rebel barons to surrender his unilateral power to tax, institutionalizing what later became known as “no taxation without representation.” American colonists would later rally around this same principle during their  War of Independence, refusing to pay taxes without parliamentary representation. All the while, Egyptian necks remained firmly under the Ottoman yoke.

The Ottoman strangulation of Egypt was not confined to squeezing the fruits of its people’s labor and brutal repression, including the mutilation of the corpses of men and women. It did something graver still for the future of an “industrial” Egypt: it stripped the country of thousands of skilled workers, master craftsmen and artisans, forcibly transferring them to Constantinople/Istanbul.

During the century of the Ottoman conquest, Europe was already paving the way toward the Industrial Revolution. In Britain, following the invention of the mechanical knitting machine in 1589, artisans secured the right to register “patents” in 1624. This transition encouraged capital to migrate from agriculture into manufacturing, giving rise to  entrepreneurs and modern industrialists.

Similarly, Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable-type printing press around 1445. It quickly spread across Western and Eastern Europe. Acemoglu and Robinson note that the Ottoman Empire barred the printing press for roughly 300 years. When it finally permitted a single press to operate in 1727 under heavy censorship, the venture folded after printing just seventeen books in fourteen years. Ottoman Egypt had to wait another seventy years for its first press, which arrived only with Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. The occupation of Egypt did not begin with Napoleon and Britain.

Human society originated as a jungle, and diverse human groups practiced invasion, occupation, and the enslavement of human beings, as they still do. Wars of extermination did not begin in Gaza in 2023. The more the contemporary world succeeds in containing and uprooting the foundations of “jungle society” and strengthening the tributaries of human civilization, the further it moves beyond its foundational origins.

It is an agonizingly slow evolutionary process, not free of setbacks, some of them horrifying, but the wheel of history grinds inexorably forward. It does not, however, move at an equal pace everywhere; the world is not a system of communicating vessels. Societies that languished in obscurantism for centuries—such as Egypt—must exert a far more “rational effort”  (a word worth underscoring ten times over) than advanced nations if they wish to build viable futures for coming generations. Every society either advances or holds back this collective journey.

Regrettably, Egypt’s contribution to human progress came to a halt several centuries before the common era. Today, in the 21st century, the rise of an Egyptian footballer in a European, or even Turkish, club has become an exceptional occasion for national pride.

Emerging from the cave

For centuries, Egyptians had been deprived of self-rule, unable even to decide which of the non-Egyptians who successively seized power by the sword would govern them. When an opportunity for self-determination finally presented itself in the early nineteenth century, the local elite, led by Sheikh Omar Makram, could not find a single Egyptian figure qualified for the task. Instead, they appointed an Albanian Ottoman officer who spoke no Arabic: Muhammad Ali. He went on to establish a dynasty that ruled for nearly a century and a half, until 1952.

That era was punctuated by the Egyptians’ participation in governing themselves following the first and last triumphant popular revolution in 1919, against both the British occupation and the Muhammad Ali dynasty.

When the Egyptians began to stir from their slumber in the Mamluk-Ottoman cave that had dragged on for some eight centuries, they woke up in the late 18th century to the shock of how far the world, particularly north of the Mediterranean, had progressed. Their historic question began to reverberate: “Why did we fall behind, and why did they advance?”

Initially, the response was constructive. Society channeled its energies into learning, led by thinkers like Rifa’a Rafi’ Al-Tahtawi and Sheikh Muhammad Abduh. In  “The History of Modern Egyptian Thought”, Louis Awad describes how political and cultural salons in the 1870s brought together Azharite scholars, Copts, Egyptian Jews, and the military comrades of Ahmed Orabi. It is one of the ironies of a wretched age that such a degree of freedom and creative social interaction would no longer be accessible to Egyptians nearly a century and a half later.

The British occupation of 1882 struck a devastating blow to this momentum. In response, two distinct currents emerged.

The first was reformist, developmental, and incremental in character. It recognized that Egypt’s predicament was far more complex than a foreign occupation. British rule was not the primary cause of backwardness, but the consequence of centuries of decline. To liberate itself from this latest occupation and the residue of earlier ones (and to avert a new foreign occupation, as would later occur in 1967) Egypt had to lay the material and moral foundations of independence, cultivating every element of its intrinsic national strength to become a formidable force in an unforgiving world.

This meant liberating the minds of its citizens and raising the standard of their vocational and academic education. It meant building the foundations of a national economy in agriculture and industry, and creating independent national institutions in every field: legislation, the judiciary, finance and banking, universities, the arts, the media, and civil associations. It also meant seeking the greatest possible international solidarity with the cause of its independence, particularly in Europe and the United States, and even inside the occupying state itself.

This current was championed politically by Saad Zaghloul, Mustafa El-Nahhas, the Wafd Party, and industrial pioneer Talaat Harb. Intellectually, it was shaped by Muhammad Abduh, Ahmed Lutfi El-Sayed, Taha Hussein, and Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, alongside literary figures like Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz and other luminaries whose like Egypt would later fail to produce.

The 1919 Revolution and the 1923 Constitution were the high-water mark of this reformist project. Its strategy bet on incremental work and on building the pillars of material, institutional, and popular strength. It was somewhat akin to the strategy later pursued by Mahatma Gandhi in India and continued after him by Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, India is one of the world's largest six economies by purchasing power, while Egypt ranks among the world’s leading debtor states.

In 1938, Taha Hussein published his iconic book “The Future of Culture in Egypt.” It was the forward-looking vision of a statesman who surveyed the horizon of the Egyptian state and its regional Arab role,  from the development of culture and education, including Azharite education. At the time, it was a visionary work ahead of its era. Nearly ninety years later, the gulf between the blind scholar’s foresight and the dereliction of Egypt’s current educational system is staggering. As the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once wrote to Hussein: “Cast off your spectacles, for you are not blind.” It is our contemporaries who cannot see!

In 1950, Egyptian intellectuals and politicians awoke to Sobhi Wahida’s book, which pointed out that the core deficiency of Egyptian society was “anemia in its veins, and that purifying, nourishing, and revitalizing it is a task falling squarely within the sphere of economic activity. We must therefore mobilize our forces in this field and surround it with every possible technical guarantee, giving precedence to the fundamental long-term interests over the minor near-term ones. We also need to orient it in a modern, that is, industrial, direction, so as to ensure we do not lag behind the procession of modern civilization, which is unquestionably an industrial civilization.”

He added that this demanded, “the participation of the industrial mindset in governance or the steering of public policy toward industrial ends [...] drawing without shame or hesitation on whatever we can glean from the experience of the West.”

Although Wahida was a liberal and the secretary-general of the Federation of Egyptian Industries, the conclusions he reached in his book, as Marxist thinker Anouar Abdel-Malek observed, were “in accord with the progressive wing of the Egyptian national movement.” Indeed, the prominent communist leader of the era, Shohdi Attiya, whom Nasser would later torture to death, asked Abdel-Malek to meet with Wahida and engage in dialogue with him. In his introduction to a new edition of the book in 2014, Abdel-Malek noted that it had sold 80,000 copies in the early 1950s!

Egypt searches for its “Hitler”

The second major current was also anti-British, but it was radical, impatient, and drawn to authoritarian models. It viewed British occupation as the root of the crisis rather than a symptom, believing that national liberation by any means necessary took precedence over all else. Once independence was won, it assumed, everything else would fall into place.

Several political groups fell under this umbrella, foremost among them Young Egypt (founded by Ahmed Hussein in 1933) and the Free Officers movement. Alongside them were other organizations that, besides national independence, embraced additional priorities rooted in differing ideologies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and several communist organizations.

Young Egypt heavily influenced the early thinking of the Free Officers; Gamal Abdel Nasser joined as a student, followed by Anwar Sadat and other young officers, before the group rebranded as the Socialist Party in the late 1940s.

The Free Officers maintained close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and communist organizations. They held private consultations with them during major events, some of which involved Nasser himself. Prominent figures were members of both the Free Officers and some of these organizations, which had advance knowledge of the zero hour of the July 1952 coup. At the time, even Azharite scholars led communist cells, reflecting a political vitality that would soon be extinguished.

For reasons bound up with particular readings of Egyptian history, of Islam, or of adopted ideological doctrines, inflamed feelings steeped in humiliation and resentment dominated the minds and hearts of this current across its multiple tributaries. This led elements from most of these groups to adopt a policy of political assassinations. It also paved the way for some to fall under the ideological, political, emotional, and tactical sway of the fascist current that ascended in Germany and Italy in the 1930s under Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Young Egypt founded the Green Shirts organization in imitation of the Blackshirts in Italy and the Brownshirts in Germany; Ahmed Hussein visited Nazi Germany and regarded Mussolini as his role model. The Blue Shirts also formed on the margins of the Wafd Party. In parallel, Soviet shifts—alternating between non-aggression pacts with Berlin and alliances with the West—confused Egyptian communist sympathizers.

Hitler’s rhetoric and propaganda machine, which incited hatred against Jews while making overtures to Islam and Muslims, found a receptive audience in certain circles of the Muslim Brotherhood and broad swathes of the Arab peoples. This was especially so because some of these peoples were under British and French occupation during the Second World War, except Libya, which Italy occupied. By contrast, the reformist developmental current in Egypt’s circles of government, politics, economics, and thought stood against fascism. The thinker Abbas Al-Aqqad even fled to Sudan in the 1940s fearing for his life because of his published positions, among them a critical book on Hitler.

These two currents envisioned diametrically opposed futures for post-independence Egypt. The reformists sought a constitutional democracy along European lines. The authoritarians envisioned a single-party state—be it fascist, Stalinist, or Islamist—commanding total control over society, the economy, and the press. The first current sought to reform and strengthen the system of government, while the authoritarian current was “driven by a fascist vision,” according to Sherif Younis in his book “The Holy March: The Abdication Demonstrations and the Formation of the Nasser Cult.”

It would become evident later, after 1952, that those among the Free Officers who held dissenting views were a negligible minority, and they would be sidelined with astonishing ease in the course of the ferocious struggle among the military men.

The fundamental divide was not over whether to engage with the West, but over which West to emulate: the West of constitutional democracy and enlightenment represented by Britain and France, or the West of totalitarianism, racial supremacy, and militarism represented by Germany and Italy. Meanwhile, Islamists dreamed of reviving an imperial Caliphate, and Marxists looked toward the Soviet Union.

Nor was the dispute between the two currents over colonialism, for all four Western powers, alongside Russia, shared a disgraceful colonial past, and several among them (from both camps) had committed crimes of genocide before the extermination of the Jews in Germany.

Yet sympathy for Hitler in Egypt grew day by day on both popular and official levels during the 1930s and 1940s. It was fed by Hitler’s political speeches, inflamed with anxieties of national humiliation, which spoke to far older feelings of national humiliation, inflicted by many parties throughout history, that lay deep within Egyptians.

King Farouk I and several government ministers were also fascinated with Hitler and his camp. No less significantly, this orientation seized the minds and hearts of a substantial number of military figures, including Chief of Staff Aziz Al-Masri, who was repeatedly accused of leaking British military plans for repelling the German offensive in Egypt to the Nazis. Consequently, Britain refrained from deploying the Egyptian army in its war against Germany and Italy, even while deploying tens of thousands of soldiers from India and Sudan, who were subject to its colonial rule, on the Western Desert front.

To understand the Free Officers’ fascination with the Axis powers, one need only look at their own memoirs. In “The Story of the July 23 Revolution,”, Ahmed Hamroush notes that admiration for Nazi propaganda and hopes for a German victory ran deep among the officers, including prominent members of the Revolutionary Command Council, among them Anwar Sadat, who would become president of the republic in 1970 and would choose to don a Prussian-style German military uniform following his victory over Israel/“the Jews” in the October 1973 war.

Certain Free Officers also sought frantically to communicate with the German military command in Libya and incited Indian troops stationed in Egypt to mutiny, which resulted in the summary field execution of four Indian soldiers. Conversely, Hamroush explains the Free Officers’ lack of attraction to the liberal Wafd Party by pointing to the “Wafdist leadership’s strict adherence to the separation of powers and keeping the military out of politics.”

The Axis powers lost World War II, the Italian national anti-fascist resistance executed Mussolini, and Hitler committed suicide. Yet seven years later, the “radical” current in Egypt would succeed in toppling the monarchy through a coup planned and executed by the Free Officers, adopting several of the nationalist movement’s paramount demands, most notably agrarian reform and the complete evacuation of British forces.

On the other hand, the leaders of the July 23 coup would repatriate from Germany an Egyptian serviceman^(*) who, in coordination with the Free Officers, had infiltrated German lines in the Egyptian desert during World War II to aid them, until he was captured by the victorious Allies and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The coup leaders later honored him with an appointment in the Egyptian Army’s Morale Affairs Department.

In this context, it is worth observing that the minutes of several meetings chaired by Nasser following the June 1967 defeat recorded his repeated use of the word “the Jews” when referring to Israel or Israelis.

From monarchy to an imperial republic

Egypt’s transition to a republican system was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately it was, in essence, nothing more than wordplay. Within his republican system, Nasser held vast exceptional powers of a “Mamluk-sultanic” character that the former king never enjoyed.

 In his book “The Personality of Egypt,” Gamal Hamdan argues that the Egyptian republican system is a “disguised monarchy.” Citing others, he describes it as a “concoction of neo-Pharaonism and neo-Mamlukism” to the extent that one can speak of “the first republican king and the first republican emperor.” Anwar El-Hawary similarly observed that the president’s powers after July 1952 surpassed those of any ruler since Muhammad Ali, wielding roughly three times the executive authority exercised by King Farouk.

It may also be illuminating to return to the memoirs of the Free Officers, particularly the coup’s nominal leader Mohamed Naguib, to grasp how militarization shaped the new republican order. Naguib writes in his book “I Was President of Egypt” that military authority tolerates no other organization, not a single dissenting word, not a breath, not a movement, and that the earth has room only for it and no one else: “We expelled one king and brought in thirteen others.” 

But the “new king” would not tolerate coexisting with “other kings.” Nasser would systematically eliminate them one after another, starting with Naguib. Only his lifelong friend Abdel Hakim Amer remained at his side. Nasser kept him because he trusted him to guard his back against a possible army coup, regardless of the fact that, by the assessments of Naguib and other officers, Amer was utterly unqualified to command an army.

Khaled Mohieddin describes Amer in his memoir “Now I Speak” as a disorganized figure who operated like a relaxed village headman, entirely unsuited for the complex administrative, strategic, and technical demands of modern military command.

Was Nasser unaware of this regarding his lifelong friend? He must have known!

Yet Nasser had other priorities, and was sufficiently lacking in moral and political responsibility to thrust hundreds of thousands of Egyptian soldiers into multiple wars under the command of an omda or a watchman!

Egypt had not yet recovered from centuries of systemic decline, yet Nasser plunged it into relentless domestic and regional confrontations. While some had ideological rationale, they were by no means inevitable. They included sharp political and propaganda confrontations with the international and Arab communist movement and, at another stage, with the imperialist states of the West.

Parallel to these confrontations with East and West ran inflammatory political and media campaigns and intelligence plots against the rulers of numerous Arab states in the Levant, the Maghreb, and the Gulf. The prejudice against these rulers arose in one phase because some were sympathetic to communists, and in another because they were complicit with Western imperialist pacts. All Arab parties, whether in power or in opposition, were expected to set their watches to the time and shifts of the sole leader and his priorities, on which not even Egyptians were allowed to voice an opinion. Gamal Hamdan remarks that Egyptians had no choice but to say “yes.” Exactly as the German people had done with Hitler.

The staggering material and human hemorrhage in Yemen and other African nations was by no means inevitable or without alternative; indeed, the June 1967 war itself was not inevitable. Sherif Younis argues that “entanglement in the war occurred primarily for ideological reasons.”

In reality, not a single overarching political, economic, security, or military decision during the 15 years following the 1952 coup—policies that would also shape Egypt for the 60 years after the June 1967 defeat—was ever decided by an elected representative body. For the first time since the 1919 Revolution ushered in the 1923 Constitution and an elected parliament, the country was steered entirely without popular legislative oversight, even though that earlier parliament had functioned under a compromised independence.

The road to a “rotten” regime

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Wahida warned Egyptians against the dominance of “political adolescence” over their thinking, warning against trivializing the paramount importance of fortifying the nascent state and the resulting distortion of their priorities. He writes: “They genuinely believe that tending to our domestic affairs ranks second after our struggle against the British, failing to see that the standing of nations in the international arena is ultimately nothing more than a direct reflection of our internal conditions, bearing little relation to the cunning, skill, or vociferous shouting of the men who rule.”

Wahida could hardly have imagined that, just two years later, Egypt would be swept up in the very political adolescence he feared—a dynamic that persisted even after the catastrophe of June 5, 1967, at the hands of a state only four years old when the Free Officers seized power in a nation with seven millennia of history.

In his book, Wahida also warned against the grip of wishful thinking on the Egyptian mind, which he termed “empty noise.” He likely never imagined that a deluge of “empty noise” would inundate Egypt through its new ruler, an octopus-like media apparatus, and a reckless broadcaster whose voice blared every evening with empty noise from the Atlantic to the Gulf, threatening and promising Arabs an imminent march into Tel Aviv. Perched atop that heap of empty noise sat the president’s speechwriter, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, tasked with peddling his falsehoods in a weekly column.

Just three days before the cataclysmic defeat, Heikal wrote, pitying Israel and promising tens of millions of Egyptians and Arabs: “Israel faces an almost certain rout!” Yet shortly after Israeli forces reached the banks of the Suez Canal and the approaches to Damascus, Heikal executed an about-face. After fifteen years of state propaganda, he casually declared: “We faced an educated and modern enemy... and the Arab side has no choice but to become educated and modern.” 

He was belatedly echoing the exact diagnosis of the liberal reformers crushed by the 1952 coup.

In early August 1967, during a meeting of the Higher Executive Committee of the Arab Socialist Union, Nasser admitted that his regime had become “rotten.” According to the meeting minutes, Nasser uttered the word in English: “rotten”! 

Was he experiencing a rare moment of honesty with himself, feeling ashamed to say it in Arabic? Or was he setting a trap to flush out malcontents at the meeting, especially since the tone of several prominent figures, including members of the 1952 Revolutionary Command Council, was critical, even as they washed their hands of any responsibility for how Nasser had governed Egypt single-handedly? In response, Nasser claimed to be hearing these criticisms for the first time!

We do not know whether Nasser’s confession regarding the rot of his regime was a rare prick of conscience. Yet we can perhaps guess the answer a year later, when his air force commander, Maj. Gen. Mostafa El-Hennawy, received an order from Gen. Mohamed Fawzi to disperse a peaceful protest staged by university students in Alexandria in November 1968 by firing on them from helicopters. Hennawy refused, and Nasser subsequently sacked him, according to Hennawy’s testimony to Hesham El-Salamony in his book “The Generation That Confronted Nasser and Sadat.”

Priorities of the new king

In his book “The January 25 Revolution and the Struggle for Power,” Judge Tarek El-Bishry dispels widespread illusions regarding the nature of military coups. A coup, he points out, does not mean the army itself decided on it; that is practically impossible, as the conspiracy would have been unmasked long before execution. A military coup entails at its very core a conspiracy against the army itself, because the decision is taken by a tight cabal of officers and executed by a vast number of soldiers who do not comprehend the true reasons for their units’ deployment until the coup’s official success or failure is declared.

Each military unit is mobilized separately under an order that appears purely administrative, devoid of political suspicion. It is issued by the unit commander, who, along with other conspirator commanders, is uniquely privy to the undisclosed ultimate objective behind these movements.

The memoirs of the Free Officers reveal a similar dynamic between the coup leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the remaining members of the Command Council. Over the span of 20 months, the majority of council members were progressively marginalized, ousted, exiled, or imprisoned, allowing the doctrine of the leader, who after March 1954 became the Sole Leader, to prevail. To achieve this, he resorted to disgraceful methods documented in the memoirs of the coup leaders, including planting bombs in public squares to terrorize Egyptians and bribing trade union leaders to mobilize workers in support of his position against fellow Free Officers.

These internal rifts within the Free Officers culminated in the arrest of a large number of army officers. Mohamed Naguib was placed under indefinite house arrest, which ended only with Nasser’s death in 1970. Other officers were gradually stripped of their political, executive, and administrative posts, while council member Khaled Mohieddin was banished into foreign exile.

A mafia persona

The memoirs of the Free Officers paint a portrait of Nasser as a mafioso-like persona. He likely did not hold a monopoly on such traits, though he was unquestionably the most sinister among them.

According to the memoirs of Salah Nasr, the most infamous head of Egyptian General Intelligence, Nasser discussed with him on the eve of the March 1954 events the idea of staging a “revolution against the revolution” or, more accurately, a coup against the coup of July 23, 1952. Nasr was one of the Free Officers whom Nasser relied upon early on during the 20 months following the 1952 coup to gather intelligence on officers committed to a democratic system in Egypt.

Nasr describes Nasser’s conspiratorial prowess and how he deployed it across those pivotal months preceding the March 1954 clashes: “He tended to conceal his intentions [...] giving his adversary enough rope to hang himself.” Thus, President Naguib and the majority of the council members were eliminated one by one, along with other Free Officers outside the council.

 In his book “Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt,” Hazem Kandil writes that Salah Nasr served as Nasser’s right-hand man in purges within the army prior to the March 1954 confrontations, which included dismissals, transfers to civilian posts, and reassignments to administrative positions in the army. He adds that 71 army officers were killed in mysterious circumstances in the period preceding the March 1954 clashes.

The main struggle appeared on the surface to be over democracy. In essence, as would become evident later, this dispute transcended the form of government to encompass the position of the military not only in politics and rule, but in all the civil affairs of the country, including the economy, culture, the media, and local administration. This would go on to shape Egypt’s features in every sphere of life before and after the June 1967 defeat, as well as during the military’s management of the January 2011 uprising.

What transpired in Egypt in 2013 traces its roots to that ferocious struggle fought in March 1954, not June 30, 2013. The July 3 coup would have occurred even if civilian secularists had been governing Egypt in 2012. The legitimacy of Egypt’s current regime rests on the 1954 coup, not that of 1952.

Red terror

The March 1954 coup settled the struggle decisively in favor of military supremacy over the state and over civilians. That somber development would have devastating, early ramifications for industry and the future of Egypt’s economy, which came to be planned and run with the mindset of an unqualified class rather than by industrialists, as Wahida and others had envisioned. The first glaring negative omen was the shock failure of the first Five-Year Plan to achieve its objectives.

In 1949, Abbas Al-Aqqad predicted in Akhbar Al-Youm that “within 50 years, Egypt will be counted among the major industrial nations.” A year later, Wahida cited Al-Aqqad’s article, but cautioned that “the difference between the speed at which we move to bridge the gap between ourselves and other nations, and the speed at which those nations advance, is to a large extent the difference between our rulers and theirs.”

Two years later, a military coup unfolded on July 23, 1952, articulating six objectives, among which “industry” was nowhere to be found. Without intending to, Nasser would confirm Wahida’s greatest fears about the “speed of rulers” in March 1954, when, by then sole ruler, he set about marginalizing civilians and empowering unqualified military men across the levers of government. Later, he granted them control over the economy and industry after engaging in scorched-earth clashes with actual and prospective industrialists. A wave of nationalizations and confiscations aimed to eliminate the plurality of economic forces in Egyptian society, as a means of tightening the stranglehold on political and intellectual pluralism.

Gamal Hamdan argued that the regime’s professed socialism was nothing more than a “name and a facade.” Its essence was “tyranny, absolute rule, and totalitarianism,” through which Egypt transitioned “from civil feudalism to military feudalism [...] and a police state ruled by the army” and an “era of genuine terror.” Similarly, the communist militant Saad Zahran characterized the 1950s and 1960s as an era of “sweeping terror.” Philosopher Fouad Zakariya, who considered himself a champion of socialism, rejected the socialist character of Nasserist rule: “I cannot fathom a socialist experiment in which abuse of power is the rule, integrity is the exception, and the number of masters only multiplies.”

A half-century march toward poverty

Acemoglu and Robinson neatly sum up Egypt’s 70-year trajectory toward impoverishment when they note that obtaining “independence created an opening for unscrupulous leaders to take over and intensify the extraction that European colonialists presided over [...] The resources these economic institutions generated enabled these elites to build armies and security forces to defend their absolutist monopoly of political power.”

Fifty years after Al-Aqqad’s optimistic forecast, academic and human rights advocate Mohamed El-Sayed Said directed a collective research project involving nine of Egypt’s most prominent academics and writers titled “The Wisdom of the Egyptians.” Said observed in his concluding findings in the book, published in 1999, that Egypt’s economic standing had deteriorated because others had advanced at a far more rapid pace over the preceding five decades, during which Egypt registered low and at times negative growth rates. This caused Egypt to slide among the world’s least developed nations in quality of life and levels of social and human development. In fact, by 1995, the size of Israel’s economy was nearly double that of Egypt, despite Egypt’s population being ten times that of Israel.

Said attributed Egypt’s sharp economic decline over those five decades to shortcomings in industrialization and Egypt’s failure to embark on its industrial revolution. He warned that the world was entering a “post-industrial revolution” propelled by the ongoing technological revolution, and that Egypt had to swiftly abandon the policies and practices that had squandered half a century of development for its people. It had to redouble its efforts and burn through the stages of techno-industrial progress. As we know, those proposals (and others by different thinkers) did not and will not find ruling ears willing to listen, meeting the very same fate as the recommendations of Sobhi Wahida and others.

In contrast, Israel transitioned in the 21st century from an industrial society to a post-industrial one, integrating artificial intelligence early on. Consequently, the gulf between the two states in 2026 is widening rather than narrowing, not to mention that Israel announced its intention to give up its annual US financial aid, while Egypt looks for ever more grants and loans from assorted parties.

The priority of domestic repression

Unexpectedly, the most violent and confrontational clashes waged by the July coup officers were with their “comrades” in the radical current, rather than with the liberal reformist camp, with whom confrontation was confined to marginalization, political disenfranchisement, smear campaigns, trials, and imprisonment. Confrontations with comrades in the radical current, however, broadened to encompass death sentences, political defamation campaigns, open-ended detention for years without judicial sentencing or time limits, and sadistic forms of torture, even when it led to the deaths of these very “comrades.”

Communist militant Saad Zahran notes in his book “The Ordy: Memoir of a Prisoner” that the apparatus of repression faced no difficulty extracting confessions from communists, for they harbored no secrets from their “allies in the Nasserist state”! Yet the torture was “all the more cruel and barbaric, aimed at shattering human dignity.” Zahran affirms that the torture inflicted upon the Muslim Brotherhood was “even more savage.”

Zahran notes in another book titled “On the Origins of Egyptian Politics” that in the early 1950s, “the Socialist Party (formerly Young Egypt) evolved toward representing a novel social coalition composed of an ascendant middle class, swelling in numbers, frenetic in activity, taking command of the political street [...] A coalition that fate decreed would find its expression in Nasserism.” But Nasser could brook no partner, even if that partner was his mentor. Historian Sherif Younis recounts in his book “The Call of the People: A Critical History of Nasserist Ideology” that Nasser ordered the arrest of Young Egypt’s founder and leader, Ahmed Hussein, remarking at the time: “He taught me politics, but I will make him stop practicing it.”

Zahran observed that Egyptian communists had not experienced torture of such savagery since communism first found its way into Egypt in the 1920s, that is, during the era of British occupation!

This is what literary giants like Naguib Mahfouz portrayed with poignant brilliance, especially in his short-story collection “Morning of Roses,” and what Tawfiq Al-Hakim analyzed in “The Return of Consciousness.” Both great writers belonged to the liberal current defeated in 1952.

A shameful marriage

This shameful descent (the torture of allies and dissenters with such brutality) would not have been possible without the early marriage between the leaders of the 1952 coup and experts from the Nazi regime, whom they brought in after their escape, following Hitler’s suicide, to Fascist Spain and some Latin American countries.The Free Officers in Egypt resolved to enlist them in their historic mission, as documented by Owen Sirrs in his book “A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service.”

Sirrs observes that the Nazi advisers recruited for this task “could not have been more heinous.” They were renowned for their expertise in torture and for having perpetrated monstrous atrocities against tens of thousands of defenseless civilians in cold blood, with some demonstrating no hesitation in destroying residential buildings and setting them alight with their inhabitants inside.

Sirrs notes that the idea of establishing the General Investigations Department (which later became State Security Investigations, and subsequently the National Security Sector) began in the wake of the Kafr El-Dawwar workers’ strike and the execution of two communist workers roughly two months after the Free Officers’ coup. Yet these “Free” officers felt no shame in turning to the British and American embassies to seek counsel on the most efficacious methods for combating communists, the very same people who had been their “comrades in struggle” against British occupation merely weeks earlier!

Overseeing the creation of this security apparatus were Nasser and Zakaria Mohieddin, who took turns as interior minister following the declaration of the “republic” on June 18, 1953. Abdel Fattah Abou El-Fadl states that the memoranda left behind by Nazi experts upon concluding their mission in Egypt were translated, analyzed, and adopted as standard operating procedure and training curricula, bolstered by relevant reference materials. It is worth noting that Abou El-Fadl was a member of the Free Officers organization and assumed the post of deputy director of the General Intelligence Service in 1966.

I can almost see the ghosts of the victims of the Rabaa massacre in the folds of those ominous Nazi bequests.

One wonders whether there is also a connection between the doctrines of these manuals and the methodology through which the massacres at Maspero, the Port Said Stadium, and the Air Defense Stadium were carried out. We may never know!

In 1956, Sobhi Wahida was stabbed to death, and Anouar Abdel-Malek would cast doubt on the official narrative of his killing, regarding him as a martyr. In 1993, Gamal Hamdan lost his life following a fire that erupted in his apartment, and suspicions about the cause of his death swept Egyptian intellectual and political circles. This was especially so because Hamdan had expressed anxiety over his life and safety in a subsequent edition of “The Personality of Egypt,” explaining that his apprehensions had compelled him to withhold certain views he had developed after the first edition appeared in 1967.

The list is long and unending, and perhaps cannot be fully surveyed; I have paused only at names cited in this essay. Yet readers can readily recall dozens of suspicious “deaths” of civilians and military figures whose paths crossed with politics in Egypt after July 1952 (at times unwittingly), not all of whom were active in political or academic life or held high state office; some were artists.

The army as a sacrificial lamb

This is not a meditation on the past, but one intimately tied to the future. True, Nasser passed away 56 years ago, but the pillars of his regime since 1954 remain entrenched, most notably the autocratic, dictatorial character rooted in one-man rule allied with the military establishment, the systematic repression of society, and the curtailment of political, civil, and economic freedoms. All of it relies on an octopus-like security apparatus that answers to no popular oversight or accountability and draws its day-to-day operating code from Nazi bequests.

What changed were details, among which Nasser himself shifted over his years in power: from intending to storm Tel Aviv to conceding Israel’s might and pleading for the “removal of the traces of aggression”; from hostility to communism to anti-Americanism and back again; from assailing the monarchs of “Arab reaction” to mocking presidents branded as progressive in Syria and Iraq, and fraught relations with other progressives in Libya and Algeria.

Nasser’s one project, in which he invested his maximum mental energies without relent, was his own persona: the construction and consecration of his individual leadership at any cost. That included sacrificing the lives of civilians and military officers who stood in his path, or whom he imagined did. This project underwent no change from the dawn of July 23, 1952, nor did it retreat in shame after the shocking defeat of 1967. Thus Nasser’s regime did not hesitate to order the commander of the Air Force, which had just been decimated by Israel, to open fire on protesters from helicopters simply because they had scratched the image of the “Leader.” Nasser’s contemptuous view of Egyptians never shifted, even after his view of Israel did!

“All that you are, you are through me; and all that I am, I am through you.” The speaker of these words was Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Nasser did not utter them, but he was most likely repeating them to himself in moments of inspiration and megalomania. Moreover, these very meanings reverberated throughout his fiery speeches, especially his famous cry, “You are all Gamal Abdel Nasser,” following a dubious assassination attempt. His insolence even reached the point of telling Egyptians: “I am the one who taught you dignity!”

The Egyptian army was not defeated in June 1967, for in truth it never engaged in battle, having received a reckless order to retreat. What suffered defeat was the regime that had debilitated the army and paralyzed the moral, political, and economic capacities of Egyptian society. Yet Nasser chose to offer the army as a sacrificial lamb to avert his own ouster and potential trial. The October 1973 war is the clearest proof that the defect did not reside in the soldier as such, notwithstanding the modest military, and consequently political, achievements of the October war. For the essence of the regime remained unchanged.

The only victory

What matters more than whether Nasser’s system endures to this day is the continuity of the sick political psychology that tipped the balance toward the authoritarian radical axis in the early 1950s, then toward the 1952 coup, then toward Nasser in March 1954 in his bloody struggle with the rest of the “Free Officers” and the other factions of the radical current.

It is the very same psychology that championed the militarization of civil and economic administration, the discourse of political adolescence and its vacuous media din, and quixotic political battles and military adventures. All of this came at the expense of giving top priority to development, to launching an industrial revolution led by industrialists, and to empowering Egyptian civilians in every administrative sphere.

On June 9 and 10, 1967, this psychology led to a renewed pledge of allegiance to the very man responsible for inflicting upon Egypt its most grotesque military defeat. A man who had practiced forms of subjugation and humiliation against Egyptians unlike anything they had endured under British occupation, turning them, in the words of Gamal Hamdan into a “political herd.”

Sherif Younis sums up the sorrowful, double-edged meaning of that scene of abject allegiance: “Egyptians were its direct actor, and, across the span of history, its indirect object.”

The only victory Nasser achieved, one whose impact endures to this day, was his crushing victory over the Egyptians as a people and a state that were in convalescence on July 22, 1952. He afflicted the people and the state with a crippling infirmity and systemic weakness with little prospect of recovery within any foreseeable horizon. This is especially so because he bequeathed them a system of governance, since March 1954, whose mechanisms abort in the cradle any attempt at genuine treatment. Consequently, Gamal Hamdan feared for Egypt a “death by slow poisoning.”

In “The Seven Masks of Nasserism,” Louis Awad explains how the Nasserist regime ruined the foundations of society that Egyptians had built “as a result of their direct contact with European civilization” before 1952. This perhaps accounts for the prevailing tone in official political discourse, which compares Egypt solely to countries of the Mediterranean south (Syria, Libya, and Sudan), even though Egyptians risk their lives on death boats only to reach Europe/the Mediterranean north, in numbers that surged more than thirtyfold between 2018 and 2023.

Adaptations of the Egyptian personality

Some observers marvel at the absence of any genuine, consequential opposition against Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s regime despite the abject performance of every organ of government without exception and the deepening poverty of Egyptians. Why? The answer may lie in the preceding lines.

Yet Anwar El-Hawary holds a different view, believing that Egyptians are not concerned with change, for change in Egypt throughout every phase of its history occurs exclusively through the state.

I am not sure of the categorical nature of this harsh conclusion, even though El-Hawary enumerates many historical episodes that support his argument, but others refute it, foremost among them the 1919 Revolution, whose significance he downplays.

Academic Ahmed Zayed shares a perspective that converges with El-Hawary’s, though from a different angle. He expresses it in his book “The Discourse of Everyday Life in Egyptian Society,” arguing that while the middle class is the actual repository for ideas of resistance, it is not necessarily the actual repository for the “act of resistance.” Its weapon of resistance, therefore, is to settle for expressing “resentment and disgust.” Zayed points to no other class engaged in resistance.

Is it accurate to generalize El-Hawary and Zayed’s views to Egyptians in all phases of their history? El-Hawary seemingly embraces this stance unambiguously. But how then do we explain the extraordinary vitality and resilience embodied in the struggles of Egyptians across all spheres of political, social, and economic life during the first half of the 20th century, despite the occupation—struggles that were by no means directed against the occupier alone?

How did Egyptians manage to resurface into active life after some eight centuries in the Mamluk-Ottoman cave if they lacked the will and desire for “change”? How come Egypt’s public sphere teemed with vitality across politics, unions, civic and feminist associations, the press, the arts, and universities, in parallel with a street seething with hostility toward both the occupation and the Royal Palace?

I believe Louis Awad’s testimony answers this question by highlighting the parallel coup that followed July 1952 as being responsible for “destroying the foundations of the society that Egyptians had built” prior to that date. Likewise, Hamdan and Zahran’s testimony on the hurricane of organized terror that swept Egypt after July 1952 provides an answer.

On the other hand, I would like to point out that what El-Hawary and Zayed implicitly refer to regarding the prevalence of a spirit of submissiveness among Egypt’s political and cultural elites is merely one side of the coin. The other, complementary side is vacuous verbal radicalism (which does not culminate in action, as can be deduced from El-Hawary, or is intermingled with expressions of disgust, according to Zayed). Each aspect complements the other: reluctance to act is compensated for by hollow radical rhetoric divorced from the realities of life and the balances of power, while loud rhetoric offsets the paralysis of action.

The stance of political and cultural elites toward the Palestinian cause exemplifies this duality perfectly. Even though they treat it as the paramount issue, their inability to act reached the point of normalizing the imprisonment of hundreds of Egyptians for three years merely for expressing solidarity with innocent victims of the genocidal war. 

Yet it is noticeable that these elites compensate for this impotence with deafening, shrill (and ineffective) rhetoric against international complicity (regardless of how legitimate that criticism may be). The comparison becomes all the more painful when made with the vitality of political, cultural, media, and artistic elites in Israel, and how they succeeded in giving expression to their position on the war of extermination, and how that carried an influential international echo!

Indeed, Egyptians in the 1930s and 1940s were able to give concrete form to their solidarity with the Palestinian people despite the British occupation, successfully organizing the first popular Arab solidarity conference in Cairo. But they have become paralyzed in the 21st century, just as the squares and universities of Europe and America have turned into arenas ablaze with solidarity that are altering the policies of their governments.

This two-faced Egyptian paradigm is what can be described as primitive patriotism, as George Orwell put it: a tribal nationalism that cares neither for individual liberty nor for societal empowerment, contenting itself with sullen resentment or hollow, shrill rhetoric. This was the most fertile soil for harboring the Nasserist project, and every fascist project that succeeded it.

On the other hand, Nasser was the best concrete embodiment in a single person of the duality of those political and cultural elites. He was a loud, aggressive voice bellowing a hollow radical discource, paired with a near-total impotence to create material facts on the ground that would produce a militarily strong and developmentally prosperous state. The sole exception was his boundless ability to wreck his people’s capacities for free thought and action.

 Nasser left behind a “corpse of a people.” Thus his departure did not dispel the “political adolescence,” the “empty noise,” or the superficial radical outlook on Egypt, the Arab region, and the world that had stoked Wahida’s anxiety. It appears that it still dominates the prevailing psychology of most of Egypt’s political and cultural elites (secular and Islamist).

On the surface of public debate among Egyptians, an unbridgeable chasm seems to exist between those labeled Islamists and secularists (nationalists and Marxists). Yet upon deeper reflection, it becomes evident that the political psychology framing both camps is no less rigid than it was in the 1940s, notwithstanding the fact that they have effectively become tens of times weaker than they were 80 years ago.

Let us try to consider where most members of these currents stand on:

• The Houthi movement in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shiite militias in Iraq.
• The right of the peoples of Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran to govern themselves without armed, repressive guardianship, internal or external.
• Iran’s missile strikes on Gulf states and its imposition of tutelage over Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen through armed militias that it funds and runs.
• The priorities of these elites regarding Palestine: between the option of society’s incremental construction of the foundations of an independent Palestinian state, and the option of armed vengeance against Israeli criminal actions? Solidarity with Palestinians or hatred of “the Jews”/Israel?
• The war in Ukraine: supporting a sovereign nation's right to resist invasion, versus endorsing Russian territorial aggression.
• The model for Egypt’s future: do they envision a system resembling modern Europe, or one closer to Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea?

Including North Korea is no flight of fancy, given that an influential segment of these elites (Marxists, nationalists and Islamists) holds a view on the economic system that lies to the left of communist China and communist Vietnam, both of which acknowledge the vital importance of private investment, with Vietnam even assigning it a leading role over the public sector. On the other hand, proposing choices for Egypt’s future from among the models of other countries is a necessary get-out, given the absence of a viable, formulated vision for tomorrow’s Egypt among both Egyptian Islamists and secularists.

The evaporation of the January uprising was no accident

It was no accident that the hopes ignited during the January 25 uprising evaporated in the span of a few short weeks. This bankruptcy is the harvest of brutally depriving Egyptian society of free intellectual and political dialogue and debate for nearly 75 uninterrupted years.

The imaginative bankruptcy of political and cultural elites may be welcome news for President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi; yet the accelerating collapse of the Egyptian economy’s capacities and the rapid escalation of poverty among Egyptians, in tandem with the worsening sterility of intellectual, cultural and political dialogue in society, lend renewed credence to the nightmare scenario that Springborg warned of.

This perhaps explains why President El-Sisi appears to see that scenario in his dreams, to the extent that he has recently taken to warning against this nightmarish scenario with frequent, almost daily regularity.

(*) Warrant Officer Pilot Mohamed Radwan reached German forces and collaborated with them until the Allies arrested him in Berlin and sentenced him to 15 years’ imprisonment. He was subsequently released following the July coup and served in the Armed Forces Morale Affairs Department. — Ahmed Hamroush, “The Story of the July 23 Revolution.”