Nasser: the Last Arab, Said K. Aburish, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004. pp355; Nasser: akhir al-arab (Nasser: the Last Arab), translation revised by Samir Karam, Beirut: Markaz dirsat al-wihda al-arabiya, 2005. pp435 The omens were good for the bloodless 1952 Revolution, masterfully organised and implemented by a group of young military men who called themselves the Free Officers. The king departed with a minimum of fuss, to be replaced by General Mohamed Naguib and his benevolent smile. Naguib became a popular figure, hailed nationally and internationally. Yet within two years of these auspicious beginnings, a young colonel, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, had discarded Naguib and presented himself as the sole leader of the Free Officers' movement and only ruler of Egypt. Said Aburish's Nasser: the Last Arab is an accurate account of the events of this period and a sensitive analysis of the reasons that launched Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the hero of all the Arabs, on a course of self-destruction, dragging Egypt, which he had so wanted to save, with him. Although this is primarily a political biography of its subject, and is a well-researched, scholarly document that accurately and dispassionately recounts the steps that took the young colonel from rise to fall (though one might deplore a number of errors in the spelling of Arabic names, some of which surprisingly appear in the Arabic translation), it nevertheless remains infused with life and passion and springs from the pen of a writer who has understood and admired his subject with few reservations. Aburish's Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a magnificently gifted individual, far superior to his contemporaries, yet he was also tender and compassionate, harbouring deep feelings for his family and friends and above all for the downtrodden Egyptian people. He also had gnawing doubts about the course on which he should steer the country. However, his shortcomings were the consequences of his greatness. He was a loner, suspicious by nature, stubborn and given to conspiracy theories. Such flaws made him overprotective when it came to his people's dignity, which he often confused with his own, finding slights where none were intended, and they often led him to intransigence when compromise would have been more to his advantage. However, more importantly, Aburish's hero was endowed with the qualities of a model leader: honest, frugal and incorruptible, he was always in earnest with his people, as well as, later, with the Arabs at large. He gave freely of his time and of his health to safeguard his country, for which he felt total responsibility. Nasser was only 38 when he was diagnosed with diabetes: "one assumes he was advised to reduce his work schedule, but he did not," Aburish writes. Aburish is in awe of Nasser the man and of his talents as a popular orator. Thus, he writes that "the way Nasser behaved during the early days of the Suez Crisis was a serial of the one-day performance of July 23, 1952. Not only was he everywhere, but this time he was wearing a suit, looking somewhat older but with a manly step and spring in his legs and overall an enhanced, more mature and trustworthy physical presence." Of Nasser's rhetorical powers Aburish comments that "when speaking, he sounded as if he were making an important point to a friend. One could say that he was attempting the most difficult sales job in the world, selling intangibles dredged up from a distant past, the glorious pages of Arab history, which he brought to life by the sheer power of his personality." As a young reporter, Aburish had the chance to witness Nasser's arrival, by this time known all over the Middle East as the Rayyes (leader), in Syria at the time of the union joining it to Egypt as the United Arab Republic. The enthusiasm that moved him then can still be felt in his prose. "For a week, the atmosphere in Damascus resembled a carnival," he writes, when "crowds in the tens of thousands roamed the streets singing old songs and new ones written to welcome their president and the hero of Arabism." "Every Syrian town worth its name sent a delegation to Damascus to join in the festivities, and so did most of the cities in Lebanon. Towns that did not have banners caught up with the rest and designed ones. There were placards greeting Abu Khalid [as Nasser was called] and Al-Rayyes on the tens of buses that made the trip...I was in Damascus as a young reporter, and along with thousands of others, I stood across the street and watched the Hospitality Palace [ Diafa ] where Nasser greeted some visitors from the north of Syria who had waited for hours. Their voices rose; their arms went up in the air in gestures of greeting or folk dance; their joy showed in the glow in their faces, which looked transformed by an inner light. They acted as if they had just seen a messiah. Then Nasser motioned them to stop, and they did, and he spoke to them slowly in a voice of reason and intimacy that told them he loved them too." Every one of Nasser's victories over the West is hailed by Aburish. How he outfoxed the Americans and humiliated the British! How thrilling the nationalisation of the Suez Canal was for the Arabs! The author seems to invite his readers to bask in the glory that surrounded this son of ordinary Egyptians who rose to greatness through his wits alone. However, ruling Egypt was not only a matter of personal charisma. Quite rightly, as Aburish sees it, Nasser wanted to rule the Arabs as well. Yet, his regime was marred by constant crises: he had to deal with the Communists, and, more importantly, with the Muslim Brothers, both of which, he believed, endangered the country's future. However, Nasser also wanted to avoid confrontation at any cost, Aburish writes, and he loathed the idea of repression especially when this was exercised against his fellow Egyptians. Yet, having promised the people that his reforms would lift them out of poverty and dejection, he was aware that he had no well-considered programme to do so and that unsettled him to the point of paranoia. Of course there would be the High Dam, which would increase the amount of arable land in the country threefold, but the negotiations to finance this came up against many hurdles, the Americans making it a covert condition that he join the Baghdad Pact in order to achieve this dream. However, since Nasser was one of the champions of the doctrine of non-alignment there was no chance that he would bow to US desires. He also knew that the High Dam was not a universal panacea for the economic problems the country faced: there was also no foreign investment, no industry to rely on, and the army, under the leadership of his trusted friend Abdel-Hakim Amer, was in dire need of overhaul. Nasser doubted that he could offer the people more than words and a sense of dignity, putting him on the defensive. He feared those who suggested that they, and not he, had the solution to Egypt's woes. Consequently, his aggressive actions were more often than not reactions and matters of expediency: he lashed out against the Communists and the Brothers because he saw them as a menace to his dream, albeit vague, of creating his own brand of socialist paradise single-handedly, in which the wealth of the rich would be taken away and distributed among the poor. This, at least, is the justification Aburish offers for the executions, imprisonments and torture suffered by those who opposed Nasser's regime. Furthermore, the author implies, Nasser, busy with his grand schemes, was not aware of the abuses that were taking place, at least not until much later. Almost as disquieting as the troubles at home was the question of Palestine. Israel loomed on the horizon, and the Egyptian people wanted war, a war Nasser knew he could not win. Aburish gives a detailed account of the protracted negotiations with the US, the French, and finally, after the Bandung Conference in 1955, with the Russians in order to conclude a deal giving Nasser the arms he needed to build up Egypt's military. Torn between his reason, which told him to avoid conflict, and his instinctive tendency to bow to the will of the people, Nasser went to war as a last resort, and what he had expected happened. The failure was enormous, greater than anything he could have anticipated, and there was nothing further to be done to save the Arab World. Nasser "failed to achieve any of his ambitions because all of them were beyond his reach," Aburish concludes. "There [was] an enormous difference between his dreams and his ambitions...Nasser reached the conclusion that his ambitions were unattainable long before his followers did. He realized that he could not unite the Arabs because the Arab masses he so loved lacked the necessary social cohesion that could produce such a result...But he never stopped dreaming...and his dreams will live on." Nasser was never as popular among certain Egyptians as he was among Arabs of other countries. Leila Ahmed, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts, whose father, chairman of the Egyptian Hydro-Electric Power Commission before Nasser's rule, was harassed for opposing the building of the High Dam, expresses some contemporaries' reservations on Nasser's performance rather well, for example. "The revolution did in fact bring about some positive and important changes," she writes, but gradually it became apparent that there was a more somber side. Soon enough it became blatant dictatorship, with Nasser emerging from the initial group of revolutionaries as the sole ruler whom no one could challenge or defy." "Soon, too, corruption became the order of the day at the hands of a new ruling class, many of them military men, who had come in on the coattails of the revolutionaries. Political repression became the norm, and Egypt's prisons began to bulge with political prisoners. The mukhabarat, a Soviet-style network of informers and secret police whose purpose was to ferret out critics and dissidents, became pervasive in society. This was not what the young revolutionaries had meant to happen. But here it was: it had happened nonetheless." It is a measure of Aburish's skills as a historian and a biographer to have presented convincingly another, more humane face of Nasser. And perhaps after reading this book the reasons why "it happened" will be clearer. By Fayza Hassan
