President Gamal Abdel Nasser
President Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser was born on 15 January 1918, in Alexandria's Bakos neighbourhood, to a commoner family with roots in the town of Bani Murr in Assiut governorate. Nasser was raised and educated in Alexandria and Cairo, and enrolled in the Military Academy in 1937, and his early years of study saw a relationship of disharmony and confrontation with his British teachers.
Gamal Abdel Nasser graduated as an officer in 1938 and was assigned to the infantry in Assiut and Alexandria, and served in Sudan before being appointed as an instructor at the Staff College. Nasser believed in Arab nationalism and promoted the principles of Arab unity, as he saw it. Before the revolution, Nasser participated in the Palestine War, where his division was trapped in the Fallujah area.
The Free Officers began planning the revolution in Egypt, scheduled for 1956, but Egyptian and international political circumstances prompted them to bring the date forward. 89 Egyptian officers from various currents, led by the Free Officers, staged a white coup against the monarchy in 1952 and declared the Arab Republic of Egypt.
A military council of 11 officers led by Abdel Nasser took control of the country, and Mohamed Naguib was declared Egypt's first prime minister under the republican era and then its first president. The identities of the 11 officers were kept secret, and no one knew anything about Gamal Abdel Nasser, even though he was at the centre of decision-making. Foreign correspondents in Cairo were not aware of his name and existence for more than a year after the revolution.
However, events took a turn for the better because Muhammad Naguib was ousted and placed under restrictions while Nasser made an unexpected entrance as the president and man governing the temporal affairs of the nation. This period in his life has mostly been called a time of internal success, while his approach concerning international affairs was a bit of a mixed bag.
