Boston filmmaker Michal Goldman, who lives in
Mermaid, P.E.I.
part of the time, recently presented her new documentary,
“Nasser’s Republic:
The Making of Modern Egypt,” at the University of Prince Edward
Island.
Her interest in Egypt goes back to the 1990s
when she lived
in Cairo for several years, and her film is a portrayal of the
man who ruled
Egypt from 1952 until his death 18 years later.
This documentary was filmed between 2011 and
2015, years of
turmoil in Egypt. It saw the Arab Spring lead to the downfall of
one autocrat,
Hosni Mubarak, the election to the presidency of the leader of
the Muslim
Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, and his removal in a coup by another
military man, Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi.
But no one has dominated the Middle East as
Gamal Abdel Nasser
did, before or after, and this film is particularly timely,
given that this
year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967
Arab-Israeli War.
It is a conflict in which Nasser played
arguably the most
important part. And while he called Egypt’s defeat a “temporary
setback,” as we
now know it was much more than that; it shaped the modern Middle
East, and gave
rise to the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As well, Israel controlled most of the Sinai
Peninsula for
the next 15 years.
Goldman’s film presents Nasser as an
authoritarian leader
who challenged Western hegemony in the region, was responsible
for economic and
social progress in Egypt, but was foiled in his attempts to
create a pan-Arab
political entity.
Of humble origins, Nasser grew up in an Egypt
still
dominated by Great Britain, and became an opponent of the
corrupt regime of
King Farouk.
On July 26, 1952, Farouk was forced to exile
and Nasser, now
a colonel, became leader of the Free Officers Movement. By 1954
he had achieved
undisputed power as the country’s president.
Determined to see Egypt free of colonialism,
he nationalized
the Suez Canal, which brought him into direct conflict with
Great Britain,
France and Israel two years later.
His stand brought him huge popularity
throughout the Arab
world, and two years later Syria joined Egypt in a United Arab
Republic. This
was the apogee of secular Pan-Arabism.
On the domestic front, agrarian reform laws
widened the
opportunities for land ownership by the peasantry. In 1962,
Nasser, by then a
Soviet ally, announced that Egypt would be run on Arab socialist
lines, and
numerous enterprises were nationalized. There were also major
projects such as
the Aswan High Dam.
Ordinary citizens enjoyed unprecedented
access to public housing,
free education, jobs, health services, and social welfare.
However, much of what Nasser accomplished
would be reversed.
The United Arab Republic was dissolved in 1961, and no new
pan-Arab entities
were created. He also became mired in a civil war in Yemen. His
defeat by
Israel in 1967 was a major blow and may have hastened his early
death three
years later, at age 52.
His successors, Anwar el-Sadat and Mubarak,
rolled back most
of Nasser’s economic reforms, and Egypt became a far less
egalitarian state.
What are we to make of Nasser’s legacy? He
remains a revered
figure in much of the Arab world. But does his politics hold as
much sway today
as those of two other Egyptians, the Islamists Hassan al-Banna
and Sayyid Qutb,
both killed by Egyptian authorities?
As the Egyptian writer Tarek Osman, author of
Egypt on the
Brink: From Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood, has asserted, the
blow to his Arab
nationalism and the rise of religiously-based ideologies “took
from Egypt a lot
of its claim to leadership.”
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