DR Reem Abou-El-Fadl ra47@soas.ac.uk
Snr Lecturer in Comparative Pol of Mid E
Early pan-Arabism in Egypt's July revolution: the Free Officers' political formation and policy-making, 1946–54
Abou-El-Fadl, Reem
Authors
Abstract
Between 1952 and 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Egypt's Free Officers Movement established the paradigmatic pan-Arabist revolution from above. Yet it has become something of a cliché to maintain that the Free Officers had no blueprint of action before seizing power and that they later instrumentalised pan-Arabism in their foreign policy, thinly veiling their actual commitments to Egyptian nationalism and imperialism. By contrast, this contribution underlines the impact of the British colonial context on the Free Officers' political formation and their early identification with pan-Arabism in turn. Drawing on pamphlets, speeches, media output and memoirs, it shows that the Free Officers developed a distinctive form of anticolonial nationalism that emphasised social justice and invoked overlapping Egyptian and Arab identities. Their aspirations for liberation thus entailed a connected foreign policy and nation building programme in which pan-Arabism was a prime – and early – component.
Citation
Abou-El-Fadl, R. (2015). Early pan-Arabism in Egypt's July revolution: the Free Officers' political formation and policy-making, 1946–54. Nations and Nationalism, 21(2), 289-308. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12122
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Online Publication Date | Mar 24, 2015 |
Publication Date | Apr 1, 2015 |
Deposit Date | Jun 2, 2015 |
Journal | Nations and Nationalism |
Print ISSN | 1354-5078 |
Electronic ISSN | 1469-8129 |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 21 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 289-308 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12122 |
Keywords | Egypt, Nasser, pan-Arabism, foreign policy |
You might also like
Helmi Sharawy (1935–2023)
(2023)
Journal Article
Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo
(2022)
Book Chapter
The "Cold War" and Other Frames: On the Challenges of Writing Global History
(2021)
Journal Article
Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference
(2019)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About SOAS Research Online
Administrator e-mail: outputs@soas.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search