Eid with Jamal Abdul Nasser

The first day of Eid Al Fitr is always a busy day for a typical Emirati eight-year-old kid. You get up really early, have a quick breakfast, put on your new tailor-made white khandoor and shiny new leather sandals and go off to the mosque with your father for Eid prayers. After that, its house-hopping until lunch time, by which time your feet are blistered and the only thing that soothes the pain is the eidiya (Eid money) you get for your trouble.

To break the monotony of these visits I would give each house a distinguishing name. There was the house with the classic American car parked in the driveway, the house with the giant gold fish that looked like it would eat your hand off if given half a chance, and then there was the house with the big black-and-white picture of the smiling man in a Western suit.

For years, every Eid I would see the picture of this smiling man. I had no idea who he was, but I was drawn to him. His features were those of a man you wouldn't mind sitting next to as a kid, the kind of person who looked like he would give you a really big eidiya. One year, I finally asked my father who the smiling man in the picture was. After a deep nostalgic pause he answered, "That, my son, is Jamal Abdul Nasser, the champion of Arab unity."

History records that Nasser was responsible for bringing down an 18-year-old corrupt monarchy. He got rid of the pasha class that had been living off the poverty-stricken peasants and freed both Egypt and the Arab mindset from colonial European domination. He made education freely available to the poorer masses, and was a huge supporter of the arts - particularly theatre, film and literature. History however, also records a darker side to the smiling man in the picture. He led Egypt to many embarrassing high-profile military defeats, suppressed political opposition with a heavy hand and pursued far-fetched ideological notions that pushed Egypt back many years into the past.

But what does Nasser mean to today's Arab PlayStation generation? Living in the rapidly modernising city of Dubai with its ever-increasing multicultural population, it's sometimes easy to forget ones 'Arabness'.

Indeed it even becomes a challenge to define what the word means to my generation. The UAE is currently in the 'Year of National Identity' and although the slogans are many the definitions are very few. When you say 'national identity' to most of my fellow Emiratis, they think of traditional dress, household items made of palm tree leaves and traditional sweets that would put an elephant into a hyperglycaemic coma. These things might have been a part of my parents' past, but it's not part of my present or future. I much prefer Twix bars.

Nasser's life, on the other hand, does give me some much-needed tools for the future. His sense of identity was simple Arabism, one that did not promote Islam or Christianity. With the use of his masterful Arabic tongue, charisma and persona, he intimately touched the hearts and minds of the entire Arab world, giving them a sense of dignity and hope that was previously shattered beyond recognition by foreign rule.

In his brilliant biography, The Wells of Memory, Eisa Saleh Al Gurg, the former ambassador of the UAE to London and Dublin, diplomatically summed up Nasser's career as being a "triumph, for he gave to the Arabs a sense of purpose and identity which, if it has not yet been fulfilled, nonetheless exists and will grow".

However history remembers Nasser - as a hero or an idealistic villain - I will always see him as the smiling man in the picture, who did, as it turned out, give me a really big eidiya - the eidiya of a dignified Arab identity.

Wael Al Sayegh is an Emirati cultural consultant, poet and writer.