Egypt’s schoolchildren in the 1960s were taught a song in praise of the man who’d appointed himself their president in 1954, at age 36—uncommonly young for a nonroyal to lead an Arab nation. “I heard Dad say to Mom,” went the ditty, “it’s all thanks to Father Gamal.”
The object of this veneration was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman who came to be the most popular ruler in modern Arab history. The thanks being belted out in classroom choruses were not for any material bounty—of which there was little in an impoverished land—but for Egypt’s pre-eminence in the Arab world. Until his death of a heart attack in 1970, Nasser waged a relentless crusade for pan-Arabism—the idea that all Arabs were one people, with Egypt as their natural leader, and that the boundaries between Arab states were ripe for riddance. This idea reached its zenith in 1958, when Egypt merged with Syria to form the United Arab Republic.
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