Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American University points out, "was not so much what he did, but what he meant to people." To most, he meant hope. "Saladin achieved success through his political and diplomatic skill," says Salem, "but there was no question of identifying with the masses. Since the time of the Prophet, Nasser was the first leader to address himself to the shaab, the forgotten masses, rather than to the intellectuals." The masses saw him as the hero who would unify the Arab world after hundreds of disastrous years...
...contemporary Arabs, Nasser was a man who seemed to promise a return to the glories of ancient times. A long and luminous success for the Arabs began in the 7th century with the appearance of Mohammed, along with his religion Islam (submission to God's will) and his 80,000-word book of holy writ, the Koran. Under Mohammed's exhortations, the flaming sword of Islam extended Moslem dominion across the Mediterranean basin. Arab armies broke the Byzantine and Persian empires and carried the crescent emblem of Mohammedanism as far west as Spain and southern France and as far east...
...When Nasser was born in Alexandria in 1918, the city owed more to French and British culture than to Egyptian. Things native were regarded as inferior. As late as 1945, a Westerner who had just moved to Alexandria was advised by a friend to learn "the language of the country immediately." When he protested that Arabic would be difficult to master in a short time, his friend snapped: "Not Arabic, stupid. French. That is the language we speak here...
...eldest of eleven children, Nasser grew up a rebellious...
...impulsively jumped into a street fight between a group of youths and the police. Hauled off to jail, he asked the boy next to him: "Who are you and what were we fighting about?" The youths were members of an independence movement called El Fatat (Young Egypt). Nasser soon became a member...