Gamal Abdel Nasser

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Gamal Abdel Nasser (1968)

Gamal Abdel Nasser ( Egyptian Arabic forجمال عبد الناصر Jamal Abd an-Nasir , DMG Ǧamāl ʿAbd an-Nāṣir ; *  January 15, 1918 in Alexandria ; †  September 28, 1970 in Cairo ) was an Egyptian officer and statesman . He was Prime Minister of Egyptfrom 1952 to 1954,then President from 1954 to 1970andPresident of the United Arab Republic during the period of the unification of Egypt with Syria .

origin

Nasser in his youth (1931)
Nasser (center) as an officer in 1940

Nasser, whose father Abd el Nasser Husein was a post office worker, came from a humble background. His mother, Fahima Mohammad Hammad, died in 1926. Even in his youth, he was politically active against foreign influences on Egyptian politics, especially the British rule that continued to be effective after its formal end in 1922 . As a schoolboy, he took part in anti-British demonstrations organized by the ultra-nationalist Young Egyptian Society in 1923 . In 1935 he came into custody for “subversive activity”. He applied several times to the military and the police, only with the support of an influential person did he succeed in this step in 1936 and so he was able to attend the Cairo Military Academy. He completed this in 1940. He rejected British influence, which also extended to the Egyptian armed forces: In February 1942, British tanks surrounded the royal palace and forced King Faruq I to replace the government with a pro-British one. Many Egyptian officers then left the army because it was unable to protect their own king. Nasser was not one of those officers. He was of the opinion that such a king deserved no protection, that he should rather be overthrown. After a stay in Sudan, he began working as a teacher at the military academy in 1943. Here he participated in the establishment of the illegal "Committee of Free Officers". In 1947 he attended the General Staff School. From 1948 to 1949 he took part in the Palestinian War as a captain . As a member of the Egyptian delegation, he participated in the armistice negotiations with Israel on the Greek island of Rhodes . In 1951 he was an instructor at the Infantry Staff School in Cairo. Nasser's declared role models were the Prophet Mohammed , George Washington , Voltaire and Gandhi .

Start of political activity

During the Second World War , Nasser worked with German and Italian agents and planned a coup against the British together with other Egyptian military personnel . The cooperation with the Axis powers was based not only on Nasser's anti-colonialism , but also on his hostility to Jews - he was convinced of the authenticity of the anti-Semitic protocols of the Elders of Zion and was one of the first Arab heads of state to have them reprinted.

Nasser founded the Free Officers Committee in 1949 . All 9 (later 11) members were too young to gain trust in the population after a military coup, as Egypt is very patriarchal. General Muhammad Nagib was a. also for this reason elected as the highest-ranking officer to head the committee. During this time there was also a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood . Hasan al-ʿAschmāwī, a friend who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, enabled Nasser to set up a secret arsenal on his father's property in late 1950.

Coup and power struggle with Nagib

Under the leadership of Nagib and Nasser , the Free Officers overthrew King Faruk  I on the night of July 22nd to 23rd, 1952. General Nagib became President, Nasser Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. In the years that followed, however, Nasser and Nagib increasingly came into conflict over Egypt's future path. Nagib was for a return of the army to the barracks and the creation of a democratic community with the old parties taken over from the monarchy, while Nasser was for the continuation of military rule and a social restructuring and had the political opposition, initially the communists, suppressed . On February 24, 1954, Nasser removed Nagib and placed him under house arrest. In the same year he became chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. When Nasser Nagib fell, three million dollars in cash were found on the ex-president. Nasser suspected that the money came from US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles . The brother of the then CIA chief Allen Dulles had negotiated with Nagib a few months earlier. Nasser used the money to build the Cairo television tower . Later Nasser used to say to friends with a view of the tower: "Speak quietly, the CIA is listening."

Presidency

In 1956 Nasser was elected President of Egypt. He kept the office until his death.

Political ideology

At the beginning of his rule, Nasser mainly represented the idea of ​​Egyptian nationalism. He also took a more conciliatory stance towards the State of Israel , which he viewed as the product of a successful liberation from colonial rule. After he came to power, he devoted himself more and more to pan-Arabism . Nasser himself gave a reason for his change of heart to a close friend in 1953: “I used to believe neither in the Arabs nor in Arabism. Every time you or someone else talked to me about the Arabs, I laughed about it. But then I recognized the full potential of the Arab states! That changed my mind. ”In 1954 he published the programmatic book The Philosophy of Revolution , which was ghost- written by the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al-Ahram Muhammad Heikal . Nasser's "three-circle theory" contained therein established a leading role for Egypt in the Arab, as well as in the African and Islamic world.

Nevertheless, Nasser negotiated with Israel too; however, his talks with his prime minister, Moshe Sharet, about a peace solution that would include the Palestinians, were sabotaged by David Ben-Gurion and by West German arms deliveries to Israel. As a result of his increased turn to Arab nationalism, Nasser also took a more aggressive stance towards Israel, whose right to exist he ultimately rejected. Nasser used radio stations to spread his ideology in Africa and especially in the Arab world. To do this, he made superficial use of Islamic rhetoric. His turn to pan-Arabism helped Nasser to demarcate himself ideologically from his political opponents - initially mainly Nagib and the Muslim Brotherhood . In doing so, he borrowed much of the content from the Baath Party's Arab socialism , but soon came into conflict with the Ba'ath Party as well on the question of whether Arab unity or social reforms should take precedence.

Foreign policy

Internationally, Nasser was a central figure at the first founding conference of the non-aligned countries in Bandung in 1955, together with Josip Broz Tito from Yugoslavia , Jawaharlal Nehru from India and the Indonesian host Achmed Sukarno . In addition, Nasser pursued the armament of the Egyptian army, which he wanted to make the strongest armed force in the Arab world. After receiving little military aid from the western states, he approached the Eastern Bloc and initially received mainly Czechoslovak weapons. This was associated with rapprochement with the Soviet Union , which in turn meant that Western states and the World Bank hardly granted any loans to Egypt and Nasser's diplomatic relations with the West deteriorated. In addition, militias from Egyptian territory repeatedly attacked Israel . Egypt also supported the rebels against the French colonial government in Algeria with weapons. Nasser gave the Soviet Union the opportunity to strengthen diplomatic relations with other Arab countries.

In 1954, Nasser concluded the Suez Agreement with Great Britain . The Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956 triggered the joint attack by France , Great Britain and Israel against Egypt, which ended with Nasser's military defeat. However, through the efforts of the then superpowers, the USSR and the USA, for a ceasefire and the condemnation of the Allied attack by the UN General Assembly, Nasser achieved a political victory that made him a role model for the entire Arab world (main article: Suez crisis ).

In May 1958 he was on a state visit in Moscow. There he signed an agreement on economic technical cooperation. These steps were based on the lesson learned from the Suez Crisis that Egypt would best run in the slipstream of a great power. This ally for him was the Soviet Union. The interests were even based on mutuality. The Soviet Union saw its chance to expand its influence in the Arab world. For Egypt, the agreement brought urgently needed economic and, in some cases, military aid. When the US stopped providing financial aid to the Aswan project, Russian money flowed, Russian engineers and skilled workers came, and Russian machines were used on the dam project. Russian military experts came to the country and Egyptian officers went to the USSR for training. Egypt also received arms aid in the form of military technology in this way.

In 1958, Egypt and Syria merged to form the United Arab Republic (UAR). Nasser was elected President of the Republic with 99% of the vote. This step was intended as the first step towards the unification of all Arab states. The main aim was to strengthen the military position vis-à-vis Israel and to transform the region into a socialist state. Until late autumn 1958 it looked as if Iraq would join the UAR as well, but relations between the two countries cooled noticeably at the beginning of 1959 within a short period of time. The union with Syria broke up again in 1961 when Syria broke away from it. Along with Kwame Nkrumah, Nasser was one of the main exponents of Pan-Africanism and one of the main exponents of Pan-Arabism . His version of the idea of ​​a united Arab nation from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf is also known as Nasserism , but it became less attractive in 1967 after the defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel. In part, this was used by the Islamic fundamentalism that emerged as a result.

Domestic politics

In 1960, Nasser drove the construction of the Aswan Dam with the income from the nationalized Suez Canal and promoted the education of the Egyptian youth, among other things by enabling them to have a free education. He also introduced women's suffrage and free medical care. The allotment of land to small farmers after the land reform initiated by Nagib also made him popular.

The economic successes under Nasser were limited when foreign investments were withdrawn in connection with his nationalization policy and at the same time Egyptians moved their capital abroad.

Religious policy

On the religious-political level, Nasser initially pursued a policy of inter-Islamic cooperation that served to legitimize its own claim to international leadership within the Islamic world. Together with the Saudi King Saud ibn Abd al-Aziz , he initiated "the Islamic Conference" ( al-Muʾtamar al-islāmī ) at a congress in Mecca in August 1954 , which had its seat in Cairo and was headed by Anwar as -Sadat posed. In the course of time, however, Nasser's Islamic policy increasingly came into competition with King Saud, who founded the Islamic World League in 1962 to reinforce his claim to leadership in the Islamic world . As a counterpoint to the League, Nasser expanded the Academy for Islamic Research ( maǧmaʿ al-buḥūṯ al-Islāmīya ), which had existed in Cairo since 1961, and had it hold annual international Islamic conferences from 1964 onwards.

Internally, Nasser's religious policy was initially shaped by the conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood . In January 1953 Nasser appointed three well-known Muslim Brotherhoods, Sālih ʿAschmāwī, ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAuda and Muhammad Kamāl Chalīfa, to a short-lived constitutional commission and visited his grave in February 1953 on the fourth anniversary of Hasan al-Bannā's death , but the relationship between the brotherhoods deteriorated and Nasser noticeably over the course of the year. On October 26, 1954, when Nasser was giving a speech in Alexandria to celebrate the British military withdrawal, he was shot several times from a few meters away by a Muslim brother named Mahmoud Abdel Latif. Nasser was unharmed and turned to the people in a dramatic improvised address that was broadcast on the radio throughout the Arab world. After his return to Cairo, he had the organization dissolved, the members were arrested or banished and several leaders were hanged. In 1962 a second wave of arrests against the Muslim Brotherhood followed. In order to eliminate any Islamic opposition in the country, Nasser, like the Egyptian kings and the British before him, tried to bring the religious system under state control.

The ideological concept of “Islamic socialism” served to legitimize socialist politics and the alliance with the Soviet Union. The Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs was founded in 1960 to promote this socialist version of Islam. The driving force behind the development of this “Islamic socialism” was Ahmad Hasan az-Zaiyāt (1885–1968), editor of the Azhar magazine. In October 1960 he praised Nasser for his “three revolutions”: the first was of a political nature and brought freedom, unity and independence, the second was of a social nature and brought equality and democracy, and the third, finally, was of an economic nature because it rely on the system of socialism, that is, on justice and mutual aid. What is still missing is a fourth religious revolution that will free reason from "submissive imitation", cleanse the Sunnah of the falsified hadiths and further develop Fiqh within the permitted limits of Sharia law . To implement this reform program, al-Azhar University was nationalized by law in the summer of 1961 and the ʿUlamāʾ made public employees.

The 1967 defeat

Cairo 1968: from left to right the Presidents Boumédiène , Atassi , Arif , Nasser and al-Azhari
Egypt's President Nasser, Saudi Arabia's King Faisal and PLO Chairman Arafat at the Arab League summit in September 1970

In the run-up to the Six Day War , Nasser had ordered various actions against Israel such as the closure of the Gulf of Aqaba , the deportation of UN troops on the Sinai Peninsula and an allegedly accompanying mobilization of the Egyptian army. Israel's preemptive attack and the crushing defeat the Israeli army inflicted on Egyptian forces in the air and on land led to Nasser's offer to resign on June 9, 1967. However, mass demonstrations in Egypt and the Arab world caused him to remain in office. However, Nasser had lost his high reputation with the Egyptian people. With the defeat of 1967, the decline of Arab nationalism began, of which Nasser was one of the main proponents.

In the war of attrition (1968-1970) Nasser succeeded at least partially in restoring the self-confidence of the Egyptian troops. When Israel stepped up the bombing of Egyptian cities in 1969, Nasser was forced to seek support from the Soviets with great concessions. The difficult war situation with frequent Israeli air strikes on Egyptian cities had already badly affected his health at that time.

Death 1970

Gamal Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack in Cairo on September 28, 1970 , immediately after brokering a ceasefire between Jordan and the Palestinians , and was replaced by Anwar as-Sadat as president. An estimated five million people took part in the funeral procession for the deceased on October 1, 1970. He was buried in the Abdel Nasser Mosque in Cairo. The behind the Aswan High Dam location Dam was named after him.

Nasser left two daughters (Huda and Mona) and three sons (Khaled, Abdul Hamid and Hakim Amer). Khaled was sentenced to death (in absentia) in November 1988 for allegedly supporting the underground group "Egypt's Revolution".

Ashraf Marwan , the husband of Nasser's daughter Mona, served as presidential advisor first under Nasser and later under Sadat. From 1969, he worked as a secret agent for Israel for around ten years, revealing security-relevant information from government circles, including apparently warnings about the Yom Kippur war planned as a surprise attack in 1973. Marwan died in 2007 five years after his exposure under unexplained circumstances in London .

Others

factories

  • Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt's Liberation. The Philosophy of the Revolution. Public Affairs Press, Washington / DC, 1955.

literature

  • Anatoly Agaryschew: Gamal Abdel Nasser. Life and Struggle of a Statesman, (biography), Marxist sheets, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-88012-481-7 .
  • Fritz René Allemann : The Arab Revolution. Nasser about his politics. Ullstein TB 610, Frankfurt am Main 1958 ( DNB 454005539 ).
  • Rainer Brunner: Approach and distance. Schia, Azhar and Islamic Ecumenism in the 20th Century . 2nd edition, Schwarz, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-87997-256-2 .
  • Fawaz A. Gerges: Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, ISBN 978-0-691-16788-6 .
  • Jochen Müller: In the footsteps of Nasser. Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Radical Islamism. In: Wolfgang Benz , Juliane Wetzel (ed.): Anti-Semitism and radical Islamism. Klartext, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-714-7 , pp. 85–110.
  • Martin Robbe : Departure on the Nile. Politics and ideology in the Egyptian liberation movement under Gamal Abdel Nasser. German publishing house of the sciences VEB, Berlin 1976 ( DNB 760334102 ).
  • Jehan Sadat : The Time of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In: Jehan Sadat: I am a woman from Egypt. The autobiography of an extraordinary woman of our time. (Original edition: A Woman of Egypt. Simon and Schuster, 1987) Translated from English by Gisela Stege. Licensed edition: Wilhelm Heyne, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-453-04599-8 , pp. 118-164
  • PJ Vatikiotis: The modern history of Egypt. From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak . (4th edition) London 1991, pp. 375-414.

Web links

Commons : Gamal Abdel Nasser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Ephraim Karsh: Islamic Imperialism - A History , New Haven, 2007, p. 149 f.
  2. ^ Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Martin Cüppers : Half moon and swastika. The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine . Darmstadt, WBG 2006, p. 160.
  3. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/meinung/kommentare/auf-den-punkt/auf-den-punkt-gute-und-boese-antisemiten/1435548.html
  4. See Richard Mitchell: The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1969. p. 100.
  5. Hasan M. Dudin: Between Marx and Mohammed: Arabian Socialism . Ed .: Mey Dudin. Createspace, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-1-5351-6286-9 , p. 123 .
  6. ^ A b Efraim Karsh: Islamic Imperialism - A History , New Haven, 2007, pp. 149-169
  7. quoted from Efraim Karsh: Islamic Imperialism - A History , New Haven, 2007, p. 152; Original text in English: “Formerly I believed neither in the Arabs nor in Arabism. Each time that you or someone else spoke to me of the Arabs, I laughed at what you said. But then I realized all the potential possessed by the Arab states! That is what made me change my mind! "
  8. Helmut Mejcher: The Arab East in the Twentieth Century . In: Ulrich Haarmann (Ed.): History of the Arab World , p. 484.Beck, Munich 1994
  9. See Brunner 234.
  10. Alexander Straßner : Military dictatorships in the 20th century. A comparison of motivation, domination techniques and modernization. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-658-02155-9 , p. 311.
  11. See Brunner 210.
  12. See Brunner 115.
  13. See Richard Mitchell: The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1969. pp. 109f.
  14. Fawaz A. Gerges: Making the Arab World. Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, ISBN 978-0-691-16788-6 , pp. 115–116 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  15. Thomas Schmidinger, Dunja Larise Between God's State and Islam - Handbook of Political Islam, Vienna 2008, p. 79
  16. See Brunner 92.
  17. See Malika Zeghal: Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al Azhar dans l'Égypte contemporaine. Paris 1996. pp. 97 f.
  18. It can't be. In: Der Spiegel . October 5, 1970, accessed May 1, 2020 .
  19. Time Magazine
  20. Time Magazine
  21. Elhanan Miller: 'I should never have exposed Egypt's 1973 was super spy'. In: Times of Israel, July 24, 2012, accessed March 13, 2018.
  22. Henning Hoff: Espionage: Death in St. James's. In: Zeit online from June 29, 2007, accessed on March 13, 2018
  23. Archive link ( Memento from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive )