Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...those who cannot afford the journey, to make the hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in their lifetime. Last fortnight, as the season of the hajj drew near once again, more hajjis (pilgrims) than ever before-hajjis from Turkey, Iran, Iraq and most of the desert cities and oases of North Africa-followed the Koran's injunction and swarmed into the Lebanese city of Beirut,* the usual way-station on the road to Mecca. Each clutched in the voluminous folds of his ihram (the pilgrim's sheetlike uniform), an airline ticket to Jidda, the airport...
...reason is the fact that all "backward peoples" have begun to realize that poverty and inequality need not be their lot. Another reason lies in the burning sands of the Negeb desert, where in 1948 the Egyptian army was routed by the Israelis. The Egyptian troops were badly equipped, badly trained and badly led; but the defeat was taken as proof that Egypt's corrupt ruling class had emasculated the country. Egyptian officers, recalls Mohammed Naguib, "were filled with shame . . . We were bitter that our country should be kicked into the dust of the road." In 1950, the Palestine...
...World War II, Britain's Desert Rats shoved aside the "Gyppos" (as they called the Egyptian soldiers) and themselves took over the defense of the Libyan frontier. Naguib was pinned behind a desk in the Adjutant General's office...
...Israel and the Arab League burst into flames, Naguib was against invading Palestine, not out of love for the Israelis (whom he still calls "the enemy on our eastern frontier"), but because he knew what the war would prove: that the Egyptian army was not ready for a desert campaign. "But the army was never consulted," he says with a bitter shrug. Naguib, a brigadier, took charge of a machine-gun and infantry regiment in the Sinai desert. He was the only senior officer his troops had ever known who literally led his men. When an enemy fusillade struck down...
...fertile Nile, cradle of a once-great civilization, is today one of the world's great slums. Desert covers 96% of Egypt, leaving less than six million acres of arable land, clinging in a narrow green strip to the winding Nile. There live 12 million hapless people, in the most densely populated rural area in the world. The wealthy one-tenth of one percent of Egypt's landowners hold almost 60% of the land. The army proposes to break up all estates of more than 200 acres, sell the surplus acreage to fellaheens with less than two acres...