It was a moment of global transformation-the end of the Second World War and the fall of Europe’s empires.
Until the 1967 defeat, Nasser’s project resonated with the aspirations of tens of millions of Arabs.
President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in the early 1950s overthrew Egypt’s monarchy and dismantled its liberal political structure, turned the Egyptian state into a force fighting colonialism across the region, and sought to create out of disparate Arab countries a semi-unified “nation” that, he envisaged, would emerge, in one or two generations, as a global power. From the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, Egypt pioneered the experiment of building a modern, secular, Western-oriented Arab-majority state, out of four-centuries-old Ottoman rule.
