North Africa – Global Political Theory

Gamal Abdel NASSER (1918-1970) was an Egyptian politician who played a prominent role in shaping the region’s politics in the twentieth century. Starting his career in the Egyptian military, Nasser rose in rank and formed a close circle of allies (many of them fellow officers in the army). After participating in and surviving the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in July of 1952 Nasser and 89 of his compatriots (the “Free Officers”) ousted King Farouk I in a coup, seizing control of the government. After some internal power struggles, Nasser emerged as Prime Minister in 1954, and quickly got to work instituting his policy platform, which would come to be known as Arab Socialism. Nasser’s policies aimed at modernizing Egypt, improving the material living conditions of its people, addressing inequality in land distribution, and instituted basic healthcare and welfare measures, as well as a minimum wage and provisions designed to help women. In 1956, the United States and Britain pulled out of an agreement to provide $270 million to fund the first stage of Nasser’s most ambitious public works project, the Aswan High Dam. In response, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, income from which Egypt could use to fund completion of the dam.

Britain and France did not take this well, resulting in the armed conflict known as the “Suez Crisis.” Although the Egyptian air force was decimated in this conflict, Nasser and Egypt emerged from the conflict with great prestige and appeared to be a model for how Arab countries could stand up to and resist domination by imperial powers. Nasser’s dream of an Arab socialist republic did not last, however, and following Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war against Israel, many in the Arab world came to see Nasserism and socialism as failed solutions, especially given the economic struggles the Soviet Union was facing around this time, and accordingly looked to other alternatives, paving the way for the real rise of Islamic radicalism.

FURTHER READING

Gettleman, Marvin E., and Stuart Schaar. The Middle East and Islamic World Reader. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2012.

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Edward SAID (1935-2003) was an outspoken critic of the field of orientalism and was hugely influential in redefining how scholars approach the field. Born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem, Said attended the Egyptian branch of Victoria College in Cairo and then North Field Mount Herman in Massachusetts. As an Arabic-speaking Palestinian in these heavily English-dominated schools, Said frequently felt like an outsider, caught between identities in a space that denied his very existence. These boyhood experiences proved highly formative for Said, and by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1957 Said had become an insightful literary critic.

His most famous work is Orientalism (1978), a deconstruction of the field of “oriental” scholarship, which had long been dominated and shaped by western interpreters. Said’s primary argument is that the very notion of the “Orient” presupposes certain assumptions about the superiority of the west and deprives people who actually live there (“Orientals”) from telling their own stories, by means of a process of othering, in which non-western peoples come to be understood as “other” and fundamentally different or lacking in some way (compared to Westerners), often culminating in the elevation of trivial (superficial and/or cosmetic) differences to the level of constituting different natures. In this manner, people who have been “othered” can cease to be considered human and lose any associated human rights and dignities. Because this Orientalists perform this othering subconsciously, Said takes it upon himself to demonstrate the various ways in which these presupposed power-relations have shaped the west’s creation of the “Orient,” in large part through contrast to the West (or “Occident”). Said’s goal in writing Orientalism was to change discourse within the field of orientalism and more broadly, so as to allow “Oriental” voices to be heard and enable those voices to take the lead in shaping how their history is taught and understood, through new, authentic perspectives. After all, shouldn’t a people be allowed to shape its own legacy?

FURTHER READING

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2019.

Category: North Africa

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Edward Said