Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Moslem sectors of Beirut, portraits of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser are plastered on hundreds of buildings. No fewer than four separate factions in the Lebanese civil war proudly define themselves as "Nasserite." In Libya, there are almost as many posters of Nasser with his fiery eyes gazing down at the public as there are of the country's mercurial military strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Throughout much of the Arab world, in fact, the late Egyptian leader is passionately venerated as a modern prophet -but not, curiously, in his own country...
...When Nasser died five years ago, his weeping, bereaved countrymen mobbed his funeral by the millions and screamed: "Nasser is Allah's beloved...
...though, Egyptians are more likely to revile than revere him. Symbolic of the change in attitude is an increasing number of Egyptian books, articles and speeches that have cast Nasser in the guise of a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, guilty of misrule and injustices...
Last month, for instance, Cairo's al Akhbar, the country's most widely read daily, carried an article by aging General Mohammed Naguib, a leader of the 1952 coup that ousted King Farouk, charging that he himself was tortured by sadistic guards during Nasser's rule...
Many of the attacks against Nasser involve his brutal repression of political dissent within Egypt. Publisher Ibrahim Abdou recently completed his third anti-Nasser book; in it he calls Nasser's prisons "more inhumane than Hitler...