By Mona Anis In planning this issue of the Cairo Review of Books to commemorate 35 years since the death of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in September 1970, we discussed revisiting some of the literature from the 1952 Revolution that was taught as part of the school curriculum in the 1950s and 60s. As a member of that generation, which, in the terminology of the period, had "an appointment with destiny," or maw'id maa al-qadar in Arabic, I too studied these books at school. In many ways, this generation was the Egyptian answer to that portrayed in India by Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight's Children. By this I mean that it was made up by people like myself, people who were born at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century and spent their school years with pictures of Nasser everywhere, with quotations from his speeches adorning school notebooks, and who used to sing every schoolday before going to classes "Nasser we all love you." In class, there were the many books popularising and explaining why "Our Revolution" was better than any other revolution. These were sometimes taught as part of the Arabic-language curriculum, sometimes as part of social studies, and sometimes as part of the "national education" that was rather intensive in those days. They included Fi sabil al-horiyya (For the Sake of Liberty), "a novel begun by Nasser when young and completed by Abdel-Rahman Fahmi," as it said on the cover, Anwar Sadat's Ya waladi hadha 'amuk Gamal (This is your uncle Gamal, my son), a review of which is to be found on p.6 of this edition, and Falsafat al-thawra (The Philosophy of the Revolution), a booklet of some 90 pages written by Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the early days of the Free Officers movement. These books are apparently regaining their popularity in Egypt -- or one assumes that they are, since they are being reissued in 2005 editions. To encounter these once familiar books and booklets in Cairo bookshops after some 40 years of oblivion is to experience mixed feelings: it is like running into someone you once knew well, yet upon meeting him or her again after so many years you cannot figure out whether he or she is a friend or a foe. Yet it was also with some little excitement that I began leafing through the present booklet, Falsafat al-thawra, in search of the familiar sections I used to know well, testing my memory along the way. The first thing I looked for was the famous "three circles", the Arab, the African and the Islamic, that we Egyptians had to engage with and which I thought the whole booklet was about. Wrong: the circles are only discussed in the third and final part -- more like an afterthought than the main theme. "I return [to writing] the Philosophy of the Revolution after an absence of more than three months full of events and rapid developments" are the words with which Nasser begins this section. I rack my brains trying to think what events he could be referring to, searching for clues elsewhere in the document, but unfortunately there is nothing in the text to allow today's reader to relate what is said in it to any particular point in time. However, since the book appeared late in 1954 or early in 1955 (the date of its first publication is not mentioned in the 2005 Madbouli edition) one can assume that Nasser is referring to what is called, in the terminology of the period, the "Democracy Crisis" of March 1954, when the political forces that had existed in the country before 1952 were clamped down upon and when Nasser established himself as the uncontested leader of the officers' movement. As Nasser himself makes clear in his introduction to this booklet, which he says is "neither a book, nor even an attempt to explain the aims of the Revolution and its events," what is presented here is nothing but loosely connected short reflections, grouped under 45 assorted headings and served up in three parts. Some of these reflections, I discovered while revisiting the text, had become indelibly marked in my memory, such as those dealing with the three circles, or the one that talks about a "role searching the region looking for a hero [willing] to assume it." These themes and metaphors, repeated ad nauseam, are familiar to everyone who lived through that period. However, I have to admit that though I knew I was reading a book that did not hold any great revelations, the naivety of it all still surprised me. Somehow, I had imagined it to be more nuanced than it turned out to be. Even worse, some of the reflections are rather offensive, particularly two consecutive reflections included in the first part of the Falsafat al-thawra. In the first of these, entitled "The Complete Picture", Nasser says that while the Free Officers had acted in the way they had because it was their sacred duty to do so, the "complete picture" only became clear to them after July 1952. "I had believed that the entire nation was ready, awaiting the Vanguard to break through, at which point the nation would proceed in a sacred march towards achieving great aims," Nasser says. However, he then goes on to say in the second reflection, entitled "The Vanguard and the Masses", that the Officers (the Vanguard) had had to wait longer than they had expected for the masses to join them. And when they finally did join them, the masses were not to the Vanguard's liking. Indeed, "the multitudes were divided and dispersed. They delayed the sacred march to the great goal. And the picture looked gloomy and threatening. At that moment, and with a heart filled with sadness and bitterness, I knew that this was not the end of the role of the Vanguard, but only the beginning. We needed order, and we found anarchy; we needed unity, and we found dissent, we needed work, and we found laziness and subservience. And because of this, and not because of anything else, the Revolution had to adopt the slogans it adopted." For those who do not know, the slogan of the Revolution referred to, which set the tone for the early years, was "Unity, Order, and Work", words one recalls without much enthusiasm to the present day, as they were set to the music we marched to during school parades. Obviously, then, re-reading the Philosophy of the Revolution many years later has not been without its rewards since it has brought back memories of those distant days. Those were the days when, still a child, I wrote in the school magazine that we had received the Algerian heroes, including Ben Bella who had just been released by the French, and that these men were on their way back to their country to take power from the French colonists. They were also the days when we dreamt of becoming like the Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, who also visited us at school and was the first man to go into space. However, I should explain that as a child I went to the school at which Nasser's three sons were enrolled, in fact his middle son was my classmate for four years. It was not a private, foreign-language school, something for which we must give Nasser credit, but it was not an average state school either. We were the children selected to receive national liberation heroes at the airport, and we participated in extra-curricular activities, such as singing and dancing for the Revolution, on most national occasions. We were also received warmly by Nasser when the whole class was invited to his son's birthday party at the famous family residence in Manshiat al-Bakri. I finished my primary education in the summer of 1962, thus leaving this model school before the al-Mithaq al-watani (the National Charter), issued in May 1962, had made it onto the school curriculum. This document has not yet reappeared in Cairo bookshops, but perhaps it will shortly. However, when school resumed after the summer break, the Mithaq caught up with me in my new middle school, a state school in the countryside, and it was taught in a variety of courses. We had to learn it by heart and recite it in recitation classes. By the time I reached secondary school in 1965, the last three school years before university, the Monazamat al-shabab, the Youth Organisation of the Arab Socialist Union in charge of initiating the young into the principles of the Revolution, had been created. Special courses including substantial extracts from what Nasser had said on various occasions were devised for the educational camps and training courses we had to go through before graduating from the Monazamah as "genuine revolutionaries". However, I never graduated from the Youth Organisation. The June 1967 defeat struck while I was still completing my first round of courses, and it was during that fateful summer that I decided I had had enough of a revolution that failed to deliver on its promises. In the concluding lines of part two of Falsafat al-thawra Nasser writes that "work for the future, and in every field, is open to everybody, and such work is the duty of every single [Egyptian] with an opinion or expertise. We cannot possibly monopolise such [work] to the people's exclusion: our task requires that we combine [all our efforts] for the sake of Egypt, a strong, liberated Egypt." Those words must have rung hollow to my ears in the summer of 1967, but then I may already have known better, since my own father, one of those people of "opinion and expertise" had spent six years in one of the regime's concentration camps. Even so he might be considered one of the luckier ones; others spent longer in the regime's camps, and some never returned. This is one of the lessons that my generation, graced with an "appointment with destiny", learned the hard way.
