Book review: Sherif Younis, The Sacred March

• Français : Recension : Sherif Younis, La marche sacrée

[English version of the text published in Spanish.¹]

Sherif Younis, الزحف المقدس: مظاهرات التنهي وتشكل عبادة ناصر [The Sacred March: The Demonstrations Against Nasser’s Resignation and the Formation of His Cult], 1st edition, Cairo, Dar Mirit, 2005. 2nd revised edition, Beirut and Cairo, Dar al-Tanwir, 2012, 196 pages.

In June 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military dictatorship in Egypt suffered a crushing defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, Nasser immediately announced his resignation. Shortly afterwards, crowds demonstrated for two days across Egypt to beg him to change his mind, and Nasser responded to the outcry by remaining in office. In The Sacred March, the Egyptian historian Sherif Younis asks what led the Egyptian people to call for Nasser to remain in power. How did an authoritarian regime that was ruthless towards the population, and enforced political passivity by means of imprisonment and torture, manage to inspire such fervour? Some historians of Nasserism believe that these demonstrations were a response to the sincere emotions of the demonstrators, while others argue that they were organised by the regime. Taking an original approach to the study of Nasserism, Younis departs from these two interpretations. For him, the demonstrations in support of the leader, which were most likely spontaneous, were also a product of the ideology that the regime had put in place after the military coup of 1952.

A specialist in modern Egyptian history, Younis is one of the most important Egyptian historians of recent decades. To some extent, his work reflects a Foucauldian approach. He has translated classics such as Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) from English into Arabic, as well as fundamental works on Egyptian history such as Khaled Fahmy’s All the Pasha’s Men (1997) and Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (2002). His research and translations often fuel intellectual debates in Egypt and the Arab world in general. Given the author’s importance, The Sacred March is undoubtedly one of the most significant contributions in recent decades to debates in Arabic on Nasserism.

The historiography of Nasserism is often apologetic or, in some cases, hagiographic, defending the Nasser regime on the grounds of its anti-colonialism, its Arab nationalism, or its allegedly socialist policies. Sometimes this historiography attempts to analyse Nasserism using popular theories such as Gramscian Marxism or modernisation theory, without managing to explain why the regime took one form rather than another, and why it lasted for almost two decades despite repeated failures. Unlike these approaches, Younis’s study focuses on ideology, and sets out to analyse Nasserism’s fundamental concepts. Through a detailed reading of primary sources (including official speeches, propaganda, and press articles by Nasserist intellectuals), Younis argues against Marxist analyses that associate Nasserism with a social class. On the contrary, in his view, the key to understanding this regime is that it did not represent any particular class or group apart from its own elite. This Nasserist elite consisted of a small clique of officers who, led by Nasser, took power in 1952 and put an end to British rule and the Egyptian monarchy. As Younis explains, the members of this group had diverse political preferences (such as Islamism or communism) and were united by a vague patriotism and an attraction to authoritarianism.

The author observes that with the creation of the Free Officers in September 1949, Nasser and his group renounced all links with political parties and organisations in Egypt, and committed themselves to strict independence from all forces in the political field. In their view, the very existence of political divisions among the Egyptian people was harmful and benefited the colonial powers. The Nasserist elite saw its first task as emptying the public arena of any political organisation that represented only part of the people and thus endangered the nation. By associating division with corruption, the regime presented itself as a means of purifying the people. Younis shows that Nasserism conceived of the people as a collection of atomised individuals, who were expected to line up behind Nasser as in a military parade. This is what the official discourse called the ‘sacred march’: the officers were supposed to embody the conscience and will of an ideal people. According to Younis, in this ‘theological’ conception of politics, two meanings of the term ‘people’ coexisted. On the one hand, there was an ideal and invisible people which, like a god, transmitted its revelation to the officers in a direct and inexplicable way. On the other hand, there was the actually existing people which, weak and corrupt, needed to be guided and transformed into an ideal people. The official ideology presented Nasser as the indispensable intermediary between these two phases of the people, i.e., as a prophet.

For Younis, this conception of Nasser became believable for the population mainly because of the regime’s foreign policy, which was attributed exclusively to the leader, and which aimed to fulfil some of the ambitions of the nationalist movement: to put an end to the humiliation of colonisation and to restore the glory of the homeland. The most important example of this foreign policy was the announcement of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the failure of the Israeli, British and French invasion that followed.

Younis shows that Nasser’s authority was based on the idea that only the leader could maintain direct communication with the people. In theory, this communication had a supernatural quality; because of it, the representative institutions abolished by the regime were supposed to be superfluous. Political passivity and the loss of freedoms were seen as the price the Egyptian people had to pay for national dignity. According to Younis, this ideology helped to create a feeling of dependence among the population, which explains the demonstrations against Nasser’s resignation after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. The emotional bond between the demonstrators and Nasser resulted from the regime’s restrictions on the political field (which stemmed from its rejection of a multi-party system), the fulfilment of some of the demands of the nationalist movement, and the effective dissemination of an official theology based on the cult of Nasser. Thus, accustomed to the idea that only Nasser could act and that they were merely spectators and admirers, the demonstrators demanded that ‘the only father they knew’ should remain in office.

Younis continued to develop this analysis in his book نداء الشعب: تاريخ نقدي للإيديولوجيا الناصرية [The Call of the People : A Critical History of Nasserist Ideology] (754 pages), published in 2012, in which he examines in detail the historical roots of this ideology, along with the institutions and policies that contributed to its spread and evolution from the 1952 coup until Nasser’s death in 1970. But The Sacred March already makes an important contribution to our understanding of Egyptian nationalism and the similarities between nationalism and religion. In particular, the use of the category ‘prophet’ to analyse the symbolic domination exercised by a dictator perceived as a ‘national hero’, as well as the idea that nationalism implies a deification of the people (or the nation), encourages us to explore a range of tools from the sociology of religion to analyse the social and ideological structure of nationalism, in the Egyptian context and beyond. This would also be an opportunity to look at another god, the ‘homeland’, to which Younis has paid less attention.