Nasser's Legacy: Hope and Instability
Within the Arab circle, there is a role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero. This role is beckoning to us to move, to take up its lines, to put on its costume and give it life.
--Gamal Abdel Nasser Egypt's Liberation
THAT mystical role has still not found its hero; perhaps it never will. It lingered long and lovingly when it happened upon Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, but then it moved on--still searching. Yet Nasser came closer to filling the role than any other man since the 12th century warrior Saladin or perhaps the powerful 9th century Caliph of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid. A burly, broad-shouldered army officer, son of a lower-middle-class postal clerk, Nasser overturned a rotting monarchy 18 years ago and brought visions of prosperity to his own country and hope for new unity to a diffuse and frustrated Arab world. At the time of his stunningly unexpected death last week at 52, his original visions had long since been altered; his initial promise had been compromised many times over.
Nasser carried out drastic land reforms, wiping out a parasitic pasha class that had lived off the poverty-stricken peasants for generations. But not long before his death, with per capita income in Egypt still just over $180, he was finally forced to admit that his dreams of building a modern industrial nation had gone aglimmering, that the most he could do for his overpopulated land was to keep it from sliding backward. Nasser had himself mostly to blame. He precipitated a succession of feuds and intrigues with virtually every one of Egypt's Arab neighbors. He was humiliatingly trounced in two wars with Israel, and sent 70,000 Egyptian soldiers off on a bloody misadventure in
Yemen. To rebuild his army, he allowed himself to become the bondsman of the Soviet Union, and he squandered Egypt's limited resources in pursuit of disastrously misguided goals.
Yet for all his mistakes and shortcomings, Nasser managed one inestimable accomplishment. To the people of Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, he imparted a sense of personal worth and national pride that they had not known for 400 years. This alone may have been enough to balance his flaws and failures. The Arabs thought so, and when a heart attack felled him, Beirut's French-language daily Le Jour cried: "One hundred million human beings--the Arabs--are orphans. There is nothing greater than this man who is gone, and nothing is greater than the gap he has left behind."
Branches and Banners
From Algiers to Aden, Marrakech to Muscat, Nasser's death united Arabs in grief. Everywhere the plaintive cry went up: "Why do you leave us alone, Gamal?" From loudspeakers atop minarets in a thousand towns and cities wafted the reedy, lugubrious voices of muezzins chanting verses from the Koran.
Spontaneous demonstrations erupted throughout the Middle East. In Beirut, Arabs poured into the streets to light funeral bonfires of old tires, shoot off rifles and explode dynamite charges; 14 people were dead by the time the frenzy faded three days later. In countless Arab towns and villages, weeping men bore empty coffins in mock funerals, with women following behind, tearing their hair in grief.
In Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, 75,000 Arabs paraded through the old city. In Arabic they chanted, "Nasser will not die," and to make certain that watching Israelis understood, they intermittently switched to Hebrew, "Nasser lo yamut." At the compound enclosing Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed is supposed to have ascended to heaven, mourning Arabs were only a few yards away from Jews gathered at the Wailing Wall for Rosh Hashana prayers marking the start of the Hebrew year 5731. Among the Israeli worshipers was the old antagonist who had twice helped humble Nasser on the battlefield, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.
It was in Cairo, the capital of Nasser's own country, that anguish over his death reached its peak. All week long, the lower-class fellahin poured into the city. They came on foot or riding donkeys, aboard bicycles or cars or ancient trucks, clinging precariously to the roofs and sides of trains rolling into the city's Central Station. Like members of some giant caravan at rest, they camped all over Cairo. They watched the comings and goings at the Kubbeh Republican Palace, where dignitaries made solemn calls. They wept at the new Nasr Mosque in the suburb of Manshiet al Bakri, where laborers silently dug a five-foot crypt.
Finally came the moment for which the caravan had gathered. Flying low over the Nile, four Soviet-built helicopters landed beside a palace on Gezira Island, the original headquarters of Nasser's Revolutionary Command Council. From the lead copter, a flag-draped coffin was unloaded and strapped to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. A funeral cortege formed, with a troop of lance-bearing cavalrymen leading the way. Six military bands, the morning sun glinting richly off their brass, struck up the melancholy strains of Chopin's Funeral March. Twenty-seven visiting chiefs of state, eleven Prime Ministers and 22 other foreign delegates assembled behind the gun carriage. The first rounds of a 101-gun sa lute reverberated across the city. At least 5,000,000 people had turned out for the funeral; Cairo in its thousand and one years had never seen such a spectacle. The mourners waited on the bank of the Nile, 200 deep in some places; they hung from trees and lampposts and fragile scaffolds, and they pressed against a wall of police 14 men thick. "There is no God but Allah, and Nasser is God's beloved," they chanted. "Nasser is not dead. Each of us is Nasser."
Facing Mecca The gun carriage had hardly gone 15 yards onto El Tahrir Bridge when the crowd swept from the Nile's banks to engulf it. The dignitaries behind it were supposed to march nearly a mile to the headquarters of the Arab Socialist Union and there make way for a "popular funeral," in which the common people would escort Nasser's body to the burial mosque. The officials could scarcely move at all. Police tried un successfully to beat back the crowds with braided whips and bamboo sticks.
Lancers on horseback found themselves hemmed in by hordes of peasants wearing the loose-fitting robes called galabias. It took 45 minutes for the cortege to move 100 yards. French Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas fought to maintain his balance and at the same time save diminutive (5 ft. 2 in.) Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia from being trampled. Security men decided that the scene was unsafe and urged the official mourners to leave. Dour Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was whisked away to the Soviet embassy. Jordan's King Hussein was surrounded by a squad of bodyguards and escorted to safety.
The procession finally reached Nasr Mosque, renamed Abdel Nasser Mosque as a tribute, but not before the coffin had been transferred to an armored car, which rammed through the crowd at 25 m.p.h. Nasser's widow Tahia fainted at one point. One Egyptian newscaster who was describing the proceedings passed out, and at least three others broke down and wept. Wrapped in a white sheet, Nasser's body was removed from the coffin and lowered into its crypt. The face was carefully turned toward Mecca, 800 miles away across the Red Sea. Nasser's soul, as far as devout Moslems were concerned, was already with God. He had succumbed on the anniversary of Mohammed's ascent into heaven, an auspicious occasion on which to die.
Nasser's last rites were the final confirmation of the immense influence he had exerted in Egypt--and beyond. His death unstabilizes an area that has become the most volatile in the world. Beyond the continual coups, the constant bickering and the incessant intrigues were two related problems: the civil war in Jordan between Palestinian guerrillas and King Hussein's Bedouin-backed government, and the long-festering war with Israel. Just before Nasser's death, a number of Egyptians were voicing cautious optimism about the prospects for peace. "We can't go on like this," said a leader of Egypt's national assembly. "We are spending half a billion pounds a year to finance this war. Israel is hurting the same way. When two countries need peace as badly as we two do, we can find a way." Such optimism gave way to uncertainty and anxiety when Nasser died.
Problems of Succession
But even as Egypt ponders the problem of belligerency with Israel, it faces a more immediate concern--the selection of Nasser's successor (see box). Under the Egyptian constitution, Vice President Anwar Sadat becomes Acting President. Within 60 days, the National Assembly must nominate a President and submit his name to a referendum.
Whoever emerges as the successor, one thing is certain: though he will be in formal command of the most populous (33.5 million) and powerful country in the Arab world, he will enjoy only a fraction of the authority that Nasser wielded. The key question is whether he will be sufficiently strong to resist Arab pressure to resume the war with Is rael. Nasser had been well aware of this dilemma. A few years ago, he told a British biographer, David Wynne-Morgan: "I categorically do not want to go to war with Israel. But any Arab leader who says so will be out the following morning."When Israeli Trans port Minister Shimon Peres heard of the Egyptian President's death, he spoke in a similar vein: "Nasser had experienced enough shocks of war to be careful in the future. His successor may not be so careful."
Nonbeligerent Atmosphere Complicating the situation is the vast Soviet presence that has been established in Egypt, not to mention the rest of the Middle East. There are between 12,000 and 15,000 Russians in Egypt-- from economists and engineers to missile technicians and MIG pilots-- and any successor to Nasser will have to keep them in mind when he deals with Israel. Sovietologists do not believe that Russia wants all-out war with Israel, but they point out that "controlled tension," not peace, guarantees a sizable role for Moscow in the Middle East. Premier Kosygin and the high-powered four-man delegation of military and Middle East experts who accompanied him to Cairo were not there merely to mourn Nasser. The Russians may be hoping to influence the selection of his successor; the day after Nasser was buried, Kosygin and Soviet First Deputy Defense Minister Matvei Zakharov discussed matters with Sadat and former Prime Minister Ali Sabry, who is Russia's foremost advocate in Egypt.
While the Russians moved swiftly to protect their multibillion dollar investment in Egypt, there was little the Israelis could do but sit back and wait--and hope. The government's television channels, after announcing news of Nasser's death, followed with an apt quote from Proverbs 24:17: "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles." The Cabinet, hastily summoned, ordered Israeli front-line troops on alert until events were sorted out. Foreign Minister Abba Eban pointedly offered Nasser's potential successor a nonbelligerent atmosphere in which to operate. With the 90-day cease-fire between his country and Egypt due to expire early next month, Eban said at the United Nations: "We do not recognize a deadline. Israel will not open fire just because a certain date has been reached on the calendar." Richard Nixon and Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath lent weight to Eban's words at week's end when they proposed a 9-day extension of the ceasefire.
Nixon received word of Nasser's death earlier in the week, just after he had been ferried by helicopter from Rome to the Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier Saratoga during his Mediterranean tour (see THE NATION). The President, Foreign Affairs Adviser Henry Kissinger and other aides closeted themselves in a captain's suite aboard the carrier to evaluate the news. The White House group knew almost nothing about Nasser's possible successors. A list of candidates, accompanied by dossiers, was flashed to the Mediterranean via Saratoga's two radio links to Washington.
Forgiveness in Grief
Nixon chose Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson to represent him in Cairo. One reason: Richardson, who until recently was Under Secretary of State, was more experienced diplomatically than Nixon's initial choice, Presidential Counsellor Robert Finch. Some U.S. observers nonetheless deplored the fact that Nixon had not sent Secretary of State William Rogers. It was Rogers who devised the cease-fire that Nasser accepted in August, and his presence might have helped mend the fractured relations between the U.S. and the Arabs. As one observer put it: "The Arabs forgive everything in their grief, you know."
In addition to attending the funeral, Richardson was instructed to determine the status of the cease-fire talks between Egypt, Jordan, Israel and United Nations Negotiator Gunnar Jarring. The talks, stymied by Nasser's missile movements near the Suez Canal and by Jordan's civil war, will almost certainly be suspended indefinitely. United Nations Secretary-General U Thant acknowledged as much last week when he decided to let Diplomat Jarring return to his regular assignment as Swedish Ambassador to Moscow. Nasser was indispensable to getting the talks going. Before his death, he hinted through his U.N. ambassador that Egypt might move some missiles back in exchange for U.S. guarantees against an Israeli attack on Egyptian territory. With Nasser gone, there is no Egyptian who possesses enough power to risk the reaction that might follow an order to pull back. Only El Rais--"the Boss," as Arabs jocularly called Nasser--could do that.
As far as the Arab masses were concerned, there was little that the boss could not accomplish. His great value, Arabist Elie Salem of Beirut's 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.
For 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 as India and the Chinese border. Saladin, a Kurdish warrior raised in 12th century Arab Damascus, defended the Holy Land against two Crusades. By the 13th century, the Arab people had forged a greater empire than Alexander the Great or any of the Caesars. With Europe engulfed by the Dark Ages, the Arabs became custodians of the world's culture and science. The unifying element was the Arabic tongue; it displaced other languages as Islam spread, and today, where its use leaves off, the Arab world ends.
Before Mohammed ascended heavenward, he neglected to name a successor. As a result, competing caliphs or successors sprang up, and their feuds finally sapped Arab power. Portuguese sailors discovered new routes to the Orient around Africa; Arab ports and customhouses ceased to be significant in world trade. Asian marauders kept Arab armies on the defensive. By the 16th century, the Arabs had fallen under the sway of the Ottoman Empire. After Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and later the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, they were dominated by a succession of Western European colonial nations. All that remained for the Arabs was religion, language and hope.
Corruption and Laziness
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."
The eldest of eleven children, Nasser grew up a rebellious boy, quarreling with his strict father and failing six times in the first nine years of his schooling. At the age of 16, he 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.
Accepted into the Royal Military Academy, he was appalled at the corruption and laziness that existed in King Farouk's army. During the 1948 war against the new state of Israel, Major Nasser was wounded in the shoulder by sniper fire during one battle, and his unit was surrounded by the Israelis at Faluja. In his newly published Genesis 1948, former Foreign Correspondent Dan Kurzman records a fascinating encounter--arranged during a temporary truce--between the hard-pressed young major and Yeroham Cohen, aide to an Israeli commander named Yigal Allon, now Israel's Deputy Premier. Nasser seemed more bitter toward the British than the Israelis, telling Cohen that "they pushed us into a war we were not ready for." Then he asked: "How did you do it [get rid of the British]? Maybe we can learn something from you."
Sense of Dignity
Almost immediately, Nasser was at work on his own plan. While still at Faluja he organized the first meeting of a secret group called Dobbat el Ahrar (the Free Officers), who gradually worked out a scheme to gain Egyptian independence. On July 23, 1952, troops under the Free Officers' command surrounded strategic buildings in Cairo and handed the profligate Farouk an ultimatum demanding that he renounce his throne. The King promptly sailed for Italy. Egypt's first President was Major General Mohammed Naguib, a military hero familiar to the public. But the new power in the country was the 34-year-old lieutenant colonel who had masterminded the brilliant, virtually bloodless coup: Gamal Abdel Nasser. Two years later, he became Egypt's ruler in name as well as fact. Naguib was placed under house arrest, and still remains under that restriction.
With his flashing eyes, dazzling smile and throbbing rhetoric, Nasser captivated Arabs everywhere. He cracked down on pasha society. He limited land ownership to a maximum of 208 acres, decreeing that larger plots be redistributed to the peasants. His goal, he said, was for the fellah to command a higher rate for a day's work than did the ga-moosa (water buffalo). They still do not. The fellah costs 580 a day to hire; the gamoosa, 690.
Though he became a professed socialist in the last years of his life, Nasser stood for no doctrinaire political ideology. His movement, he admitted, was "a revolution without a plan." More precisely, it was a revolution to rid the Arab world of foreign domination--a job that was bound to involve tragic excesses. Former U.S. Ambassador to Cairo Raymond Hare has characterized it as "a revulsion rather than a revolution." Convinced that Israel's statehood represented part of the domination that he detested, Nasser felt compelled to waste Egyptian resources in military conflicts with the new nation. At home, he became a dictator who jailed his political opponents and spied on outsiders.
Pageants of Sunrise
His greatest construction project was the vast Aswan High Dam, designed to generate cheap electricity and create some 1,500,000 acres of newly fertile land. To finance it, Nasser turned to both the U.S. and Russia. Rebuffed by the U.S. on a request to purchase weapons in 1955, Nasser stunned--and delighted--the Arab world by announcing that he had made an Iron Curtain arms deal through Czechoslovakia. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thereupon scratched Aswan as an American aid project, and Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal. "Americans," he cried, "may you choke on your fury!"
Britain and France, fearful of being strangled by a cutoff of Suez traffic, joined the Israelis in 1956 in a surprise attack on Egypt. Though Nasser's forces were badly beaten, he was saved when the U.S. and the Soviet Union combined to compel all three nations to withdraw their forces.
Nasser gained immense prestige throughout the Arab world, and he quickly exploited it. In one Arab state after another, he engineered pro-Nasser takeovers. Nasser proudly called the coups "pageants of sunrise," but the results often did not last much past sundown. His agents in Iraq helped to assassinate King Feisal II, tried at times to topple Hussein in Jordan, and assisted successful revolutions in Libya and the Sudan. They filtered through so many Middle East capitals weaving plots that there were increasing protests. During a 1966 visit, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson told him: "Mr. President, the U.S. Government has received complaints from every Arab government of subversive activity by your people." Nasser, feebly professing surprise, said that surely there were at least one or two states where nothing had ever been attempted. "Mr. President," Anderson said, "there are no exceptions."
Nasser's greatest failure as a sponsor of revolution was in Yemen, where Egyptian troops fought for five years in an ill-advised campaign to depose the Imam Badr and replace him with a republican government. "I was convinced that I was participating in a genuine war of liberation," Nasser said after the campaign had ended. "By the time I found out it was a tribal war, it was too late to get out with honor. I found myself stuck." Small wonder that some observers dubbed Yemen "Nasser's Viet Nam."
His greatest debacle was awaiting him in June 1967, when Nasser rashly took Syria's word that Israel was preparing an attack and ordered U.N. peacekeeping forces out of the Gaza Strip. He later admitted that he had not expected Secretary-General U Thant to comply. To his surprise, Thant rushed the U.N. troops out, leaving an obvious danger zone unguarded. In the face of Egyptian mobilization, the Israelis launched a devastating pre-emptive attack on Egypt. Drubbed in the Six-Day War, Nasser resigned, knowing that the Arab masses would plead for him to return. He did, a scant 16 hours after his resignation, promising that the Arabs would strike back against Israel with "one hand." Gradually rebuilding his forces, Nasser launched a "war of attrition" against the Israelis, who were dug in along the Suez Canal. Despite his constant advocacy of nonalignment, he grew increasingly dependent on Moscow to fuel his 288,000-man military machine. All the while, he denied that he was in danger of becoming Moscow's tool. A few weeks ago, Nasser told a visiting British Member of Parliament, Laborite Christopher Mayhew: "Western papers say that I am going to become another Czechoslovakia. How do they think these Russian technicians are going to seize power? I have my army, my police and no Communist Party [it is outlawed in Egypt]. What are they going to do --march on Cairo?"
If Russia's growing role in Egypt did not trouble Nasser, the growing drain of the conflict with Israel apparently did. In August, he accepted a U.S. initiative calling for a cease-fire at Suez and peace talks. Then the Jordanian civil war erupted, with Arab fighting Arab, and Nasser was again cast in the peacemaker's role. He summoned Arab heads of government to Cairo for a summit to settle the fighting.
Race with Death
Throughout his career, Nasser maintained a ferocious 18-hour workday, taking time out only occasionally for a day in the sun at Alexandria's Agame beach. His relaxations were not enough to relieve a chronic case of nerves: visitors to his office noticed that he constantly wiggled his leg, and during much of his adult life he smoked 100 U.S. and British cigarettes a day. He was a devoted husband and an attentive father to his five children, but lavished few luxuries on his family. He never gave up the suburban villa that he had occupied as an army lieutenant colonel, though he had it considerably enlarged. Nor did he lose the ordinary man's sense of surprise at sumptuous living. Once, while visiting Saudi Arabian royalty at the best suite in the Nile Hilton, Egypt's dictator whispered, wide-eyed, to an aide: "How much does this cost a day?"
Work was his life, but the brutal pace of the Arab summit proved too much for him. For ten days he labored to stop the fighting in Jordan and head off any abrasive settlement that might hurt Arab unity. Fiery nationalists like Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Algeria's Houari Boumedienne, for instance, wanted to send troops to join the guerrillas against Hussein until Nasser dissuaded them. After the summit worked out ground rules for a cease-fire in Jordan, Nasser managed to get both Hussein and Guerrilla Leader Yasser Arafat to Cairo for a conciliatory hand shake in his presence.
Such intense negotiations visibly fatigued Nasser. Minister of National Guidance and Al Ahram Editor Hasanein Heikal urged the President to slow down. "There are men, women and children dying," Nasser replied. "We are in a race with death." Later, as Nasser drove to Cairo airport to bid goodbye to Kuwait's Emir Sabah es Salem es Sabah, last of the captains and kings to depart from the summit, Heikal again pleaded with his boss to take a rest.
"After I say goodbye to the Emir,"sighed Nasser, "I shall sleep long enough." Almost at the moment the Emir's blue and white Kuwait Airways jet became airborne, Nasser was stricken. Perspiring heavily and unable to stand, he was helped into his limousine.
At his home at Manshiet al Bakri, a waiting physician ordered an oxygen tent and summoned three specialists for consultation. The diagnosis: massive coronary thrombosis.
Red Alert Nasser suffered a similar attack a year ago. At that time, he remained in bed for six weeks, but the illness was publicly reported as influenza; only after his death was it revealed to have been a heart attack. Last July, when he was in the Soviet Union seeking additional missiles to counter Israeli Phantom jets, Nasser checked into a clinic for a two-week examination. Soviet doctors ordered him to stop smoking and follow an easier regime. He gave up cigarettes but continued to work long hours.
As Nasser began to weaken last week, his family and special friends were summoned to his bedside. Heikal and Sadat were there, together with Defense Minister Mohammed Fawzi and two old companions from the 1952 revolutionary days of the Free Officers Movement, Hussein Shafei and Ali Sabry. After Nasser died, it fell to Sadat as Acting President to break the news to the nation. He waited three hours, while a red alert was flashed to put army units on guard against a possible Israeli attack. Then a weeping Sadat went on television to say: "The U.A.R., the Arab nation and humanity have lost the most precious man, the most courageous and most sincere man."
Patient Mediator For much of his life, Nasser was an in corrigible conspirator, and his enemies were never benign. Former Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion said last week:
"He was a liar without equal." It is ironic that at the time of his death he had evolved into a patient mediator, seeking to settle the quarrels that flared interminably among his fellow Arabs. He even seemed to have abandoned the dream that had prompted the conspiracy: transforming all the Arab League nations into socialist governments that would function as a kind of consortium, presumably with Egyptians at the head.
In the end, Nasser realized that the Arab world was simply too diffuse to weld together. Its governments range from revolutionary regimes through moderate governments to conservative kingdoms (see map). To fuse them into a single unit would be all but impossible. The closest approach, the 1958 amalgamation of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, lasted only three years before the Syrians seceded, complaining of Egyptian domination. Nasser's aim after that fiasco was to form a consortium of governments that would remain politically separate but would work together militarily and economically. At the time of his death, he was trying to develop such a complex with the new revolutionary regimes of Libya and the Sudan.
Peace in Palestine
Nasser had also come to realize that the future of the Arab world depended on one key achievement: a solution to the 22-year-old Palestinian problem and the status of Israel. After a series of defeats at the hands of the Israelis, he finally concluded that there could be no lasting military settlement--even though he often acted as if that were the only answer to the problem. The Palestinian solution, he would say in private conversations, depended not on war but on the emergence of "a new Arab who would sweep away the old world of sheiks and sultans and kings. Only when this new Arab emerges will we be able to solve the Palestine problem with dignity. It may not happen in my lifetime. But it will happen."
Nasser himself had hoped to create "the new Arab." With this in mind, apparently, he decided to accept the Rogers peace plan two months ago. His death leaves a solution in doubt. No one is strong enough so far to succeed him, not merely as leader of Egypt but as spokesman for the millions of Arabs elsewhere. Boumedienne is the senior revolutionary surviving Nasser, but Algeria is more North African than Middle Eastern, somewhat remote from the center of the conflict. Libya's Gaddafi may consider himself a successor, but he is too new, too brash and too untested for other Arab leaders to accept him. Saudi Arabia's Feisal, as keeper of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, has long dreamed of claiming Arab leadership on religious grounds. But Feisal's government is so medieval that few young Arabs would follow him. Guerrilla Leader Yasser Arafat rules no country and thus lacks a true power base, even though he does sit as an ex officio 15th member of the Arab League because of the size and strength of the fedai movement.
A Perfect Community
Ultimately, the value of Nasser's legacy will be determined in two areas: Egypt and the broader Arab community.
After nearly two decades of his rule, Egypt is something less than a monument to enlightened rule. By 1980, because of a scarcely controllable population explosion, there will be 50 million Egyptians; yet the country today lacks the industrial base to support half that population. "This people is today no less poor than in Farouk's days," notes Israel's Deputy Premier Allon, "and some say it is even poorer." Not until the interminable drain of the war with Israel has been stanched is the country likely to emerge from the backwardness that persisted under Nasser. "If it does," writes British Biographer Peter Mansfield (Nasser's Egypt), "the Egyptian revolution of 1952 will be a seminal event of the 20th century. If it does not, Nasserism will leave as little impression on the world as Italian Fascism."
In the broader world, Nasser may fare better. Islam is, after all, based on the notion of what Arabist Salem calls "a perfect community." Through the unifying force of the Arabic tongue, Nasser the master orator did much to restore that sense of community after centuries of foreign rule had seemingly shattered it for all time.
The Caliph's Advice
When Mohammed died, his first caliph, Abu Bakr, told the Prophet's mourning followers: "If you worship Mohammed, Mohammed has died. But if you worship Allah, he is alive and never will die." Throughout the Middle East, a variation of that aphorism was broadcast over Arab radios last week: "If you worship Gamal, Gamal is dead. But if you worship the ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser, they are alive and will never die." Nasser had many ideas, not all of them worth preserving. The future of the Middle East may thus depend on which the Arab world jettisons and which it retains to worship.
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