Word: gamal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...leadership of the 100 million Arabs is, in the famous words of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, "a role wandering aimlessly about in search of an actor to play it." Now that Nasser is dead, now that his successors are gray and conventional, it is the implausible figure of Muammar Gaddafi that has acquired the role of an Arab Parsifal. He is a mere 31 years old, handsome, devout, ardent, even fanatical. "The Arabs need to be told the facts," he is fond of saying. "The Arabs need someone to make them weep, not someone to make them laugh...
...disillusionment now widespread in the Arab world is traced by some scholars to the false hopes raised by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All Arabists agree that the Six-Day War of 1967 was a pivotal event in the history of the region. Says Shimon Shamir, Arab specialist at the Shiloah Institute in Tel Aviv: "The conflict with-and defeat by -Israel was a microcosm of the whole Arab experience with the West." He means that ever since the Renaissance, the whole power of Arab ideology, or political Islam, has been in conflict with...
Sadat let slip some rare criticism of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian army had not been properly trained under Nasser to fight an offensive war, Sadat declared-and it had also become too political. "The Egyptian army should have been converted to a fighting army after the 1956 Suez war," Sadat told al Hawadess. Egypt at that point had suffered a military setback, "but we turned it into a political victory" (when President Eisenhower forced Britain, France and Israel to desist in their combined attack on Egypt...
...rewarded the Arab Socialist Union Congress with a first-class example of it. Mopping his brow often in a sultry hall, modulating his voice from whisper to thespian holler, Sadat delivered a largely off-the-cuff speech that was twice as long as any address delivered by his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and every bit as dramatic. Excerpts...
There had been student demonstrations protesting Sadat's inaction and the unreliability of his Soviet allies. Old army colleagues who, with Sadat, had helped Gamal Abdel Nasser seize revolutionary power 20 years ago this week sent Sadat a secret memo about extravagant dependence on the Soviet devil. The contents were so sensitive that Sadat refused to make them public (a copy was eventually shaken free in Paris...