Nasser as He Governed

The Centre for Arab Unity Studies has released the second, expanded, and revised edition of Kamal Khalaf Al-Tawil’s book Nasser as He Governed.

The book sheds light on a pivotal period in contemporary Arab history, witnessing the rise to power of key components of the Arab nationalist movement in three central Arab countries—nations that exerted significant influence on the Arab, regional, and international landscapes amidst historical circumstances fraught with transformations and challenges.

The Arab nationalist movement emerged in the first half of the last century as a project of renaissance—aimed at lifting the region out of its stagnation and uniting it on the foundations of a shared Arab cultural identity and history—and, simultaneously, as a national liberation movement confronting schemes of colonial hegemony. The partition of the Arab region and the planting of the Zionist entity in its heart represented some of the most prominent manifestations, dangers, impacts, and mechanisms of control associated with that hegemony. Thus, Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine stood out as the primary causes that the nationalist movement—through its Nasserist and Ba’athist currents—sought to realize. Yet, the fact that these two currents held power in various Arab countries over several decades proved insufficient to achieve these two goals, let alone other political, social, and economic objectives. This book revisits the era of Arab nationalism in power, focusing on three countries governed by the two dominant Arab nationalist currents: the Nasserist movement (in Egypt and, briefly, in Syria) and the Ba’ath Party (in Syria and Iraq, operating through separate wings).

This book examines Gamal Abdel Nasser’s experience in power, comprising the first two parts of Kamal Khalaf Al-Tawil’s trilogy, “A New Visit to Arab History”. The trilogy was originally published in 2024 across three volumes—the first two covering the Nasser era and the third the experience of the Ba’ath Party. In this new edition, the author has combined the first two parts into a single volume, incorporating revisions and adding new chapters that shed further light on specific events and figures from that era; the volume concerning the Ba’ath Party is slated for release later in a similarly expanded edition. This book reveals significant details regarding these experiences across their various dimensions—political, military, security, and administrative—as well as the local, Arab, and international contexts in which they emerged, the challenges they faced, the achievements they realized, and the failures they encountered. It sheds light on many details concerning the trajectories of both Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Ba’ath Party—in Syria and Iraq respectively—and offers a critical, pan-Arab perspective on these experiences, providing lessons applicable to any emancipatory pan-Arab project in the present and future.