When former president Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt died in 1970, the Arab world lost its most charismatic leader, a statesman who had enjoyed unprecedented legitimacy.
Few managed to replace him after his untimely demise, though Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Hafiz Al Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussain of Iraq tried to replicate his achievements.
Even after the devastating 1967 war, whose 50-year anniversary will largely be ignored in the coming weeks, Nasser commanded the kind of loyalty that was and is the envy of every official.
Lest we forget, however, Nasser advocated secular pan-Arabism that failed to galvanise Arab masses outside his country as most preferred to remain true to their traditions nestled in faith.
Those who anchored their political visions in Islam, like Faisal Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan in the UAE, distanced their nations from ideological whirlwinds.
They backed Arabism but rejected secularism, liberalism, socialism and Communism alike, preferring to base their outlook on concepts that satisfied Muslim aspirations.
Beyond Nasser’s charisma, which many Arab orators duplicated — even if few enjoyed the collusion — from literate men like Fahmi Huwaidi and Mohammad Heikal — the first a columnist and the latter the then editor of Egypt’s state-run newspaper Al Ahram — most Arab leaders invested in building their intelligentsia, develop their countries and defend themselves from excessive nationalism that pretended that whatever wealth existed in any Arab country literally belonged to the entire Arab nation.
In fact, Nasser had penned a magnum opus in 1954, The Philosophy of the Revolution, in which he revealed his vision of the Arab world in the clearest terms possible, even as he emphasised that Egypt, by virtue of its unique geostrategic position at the crossroads of the African, Arab and Islamic worlds, ought to play the pivotal leadership role.
He called for the use of oil as an economic weapon as he conceptualised a framework that elevated petroleum into a unique category, and pointed out that Arabs could use oil as a weapon to free themselves from foreign domination.
It was destiny, he believed, and wrote: “The annals of history are full of heroes who carved for themselves great and heroic roles and played them on momentous occasions on the stage. History is also charged with great heroic roles for which we do not find actors. I do not know why I always imagine that in this region, in which we live, there is a role wandering aimlessly about seeking an actor to play it. I do not know why this role, tired of roaming about in this vast region which extends to every place around us, should at last settle down, weary and worn out, on our frontiers beckoning us to move, to dress up for it and to perform it since there is nobody else who can do so.”
Modesty aside, this remarkable paragraph set the stage for the Cairenese’s vision for himself as he aspired to be the leader of nearly 60 million Arabs and, perhaps, the approximate 450 million Muslims in the mid-1950s.
The thesis further elaborated his views on unity and the kind of obstacles that stood in its way that, the Pan-Arab hero posited, were all based on “suspicion” as well as the mistake in how Arab leaders defined power.
“Power is not merely shouting aloud,” Nasser wrote, but it “is to act positively with all the components of power,” which he identified as being made of three components: “Spiritual and material bonds” that gave Arabs “traits, components and civilisation;” “important strategic situation” that was “the crossroads and the military corridor of the world;” and petroleum, “the vital nerve of civilisation, without which none of its means can exist.”
To be sure, Nasser balanced his strategic objectives by playing the two rival superpowers against each other, but the 1967 War ended his aspirations. It fell on King Faisal to rescue Egypt from economic, political and military irrelevance.
The man who was a hero of the Nonaligned Movement, rubbing shoulders with anti-imperialist leaders like Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia, finally understood that legitimacy had to be earned.
Fifty years later, his successors continue to grapple with instability and various other challenges, now with the added burden of extremist movements like Al Qaida and Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) adding fuel to the fire. Today, Cairo accepts Saudi Arabia and Arab Gulf assistance at all levels, and while Egyptian leaders attempt to retain a level of independence, it is increasingly clear that Arab power is now in Saudi hands.
This is the ultimate lesson of the 1967 War — a remarkable shift in influence from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, even if few seem to absorb this new reality.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the just-published The Attempt to Uproot Sunni Arab Influence: A Geo-Strategic Analysis of the Western, Israeli and Iranian Quest for Domination (Sussex: 2017).
