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Eamon, could you please tell me your precise location and where you're going to be for the next three or four days? A guy with a funny accent called earlier and asked me if I knew. Really? No. Okay, this joke doesn't work. I want it to sound like an assassin is trying to find out where you are.
For me, like, you know, oh, really? Because what happened is, you're not the first one. Some associate, like, you know, was called and was saying, like, we know who you associate with, like, you know, and we tell him his days are numbered. Oh, my God. Well, you're still alive. That's what matters. Yeah. You know, the guy ended up being picked up by the UK services. Turns out, like, you know, he's just an Islamist from Blackburn. No, Oldham. Sorry, Oldham, which is near Blackburn. Let's get into it.
Eamon, I realized the other day that in our last episode, I was so excited to tell the story of Muhammad Masadiq that I forgot to address the clash of civilizations dimension of the episode. This season is supposed to be about the clash of civilizations, and does that help us understand modern Middle Eastern history at all? Maybe we can quickly talk about that to kind of see how we are so far in the series. In the last episode, we explored Iran's
painful experience of modernization, first by being caught between two large European empires, the British and the Russian, and then by being an early Cold War ideological epicenter. This has been Iran's experience over the modern period, and it's not so different from what most Muslim countries have gone through for the past two centuries, really. So, Ayman, what do you think? Is there a clash of civilizations going on here? Is Western modernity essentially incompatible with the Islamic tradition?
And so are Muslims today burdened with a sort of civilizational split personality? Well, again, we come back to how do we define civilization here? If you mean by modernity, you know, modern equipment, modern education, modern science, I don't think there is any clash. The clash comes with modern values.
Sure, but are they separable? Modern values informed modern technological development, didn't they? Values like individualism, skepticism, rationalism. It's by these values that Western scientists and engineers built up the modern world. Look at Japan. Japan.
They shed some of their antiquated systems of governance and they got rid of some of the antiquated ways of running the society, but they kept their tradition and they were able to industrialize without being too westernized. However, I think in the
current, I would say, geopolitical, socioeconomic atmosphere of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, the clash was not always with science, technology, engineering, as well as the ideas of free market and individualism, because these are Islamic values. Islam is as capitalistic as it could be.
It is the problem with Islam generally being always socially conservative as well as fiscally conservative. You know, yes, there is a room for scientific experimentation. There is a room for skepticism. There is a room for research and development. The problem comes with the social norms being, you know, more or less shaken and challenged.
Well, you know, you and I have argued about this a lot over our steak dinners and over our phone calls. Can one separate entirely the ethos of the West from its scientific and technological development? I mean, you mentioned Japan. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I sometimes wonder, you know, are the Japanese, you know, burdened with a sort of civilizational split personality as well? I'm not entirely sure they aren't.
I don't know. That's what this series is about. We want to explore these questions while we tell a fascinating story of modern Middle Eastern history. And today, we're pivoting from Iran in the Cold War to Egypt in the Cold War. Specifically, we want to tell the story of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the event that perhaps more than any other signaled the changing of the guard from the old European colonial empires to the new American one.
The Cold War connection between Iran and Egypt is actually closer than you might think, Eamon. As we discussed in the last episode, in 1953, the CIA worked together with Iranian power players to launch Operation Ajax, a coup that overthrew Mossadegh. Well, Eamon, have you ever heard of, I promise you this is the name, Project Fat Fucker? Fat what?
Project Fat Fucker. No. You're joking, yeah? You know, you're just pulling my leg here. No.
The year before Operation Ajax in 1952, the CIA did the exact same thing, but in Egypt. They worked with disaffected Egyptian army officers to overthrow the king of Egypt, King Farouk. And due to the king's corpulence, the CIA codenamed the operation Project Fat Fucker. Ha ha ha!
It's weird that people don't know about this. Maybe because we're cool with it when the CIA overthrows kings, but not elected prime ministers. I don't know. Poor Farouk. I mean, he had so many bad things happen to him in life, just to add insult to injury here. Anyway, more on that later. First, Egypt in general. Egypt, Umm Adunya, the mother of the world.
Eamon, in a book published in 1997, the author wrote, Egypt has been and continues to be the most important Arab country. That was written in 1997. Eamon, would that sentence be written today? First of all, I don't know, Thomas, if it is accurate or not, and we're going to discuss this throughout the episode, but all I want to tell you is that Egypt is my favorite country in the Middle East.
Really? It is, first of all, it is the place where I love to go for holidays. It is a place where I love to go for a break. It is, you know, my love, especially Alexandria. I love going to Alexandria and just marvel in its cultural, you know, scene, its food, its atmosphere, the vibe, the northern shores, just to the west of Alexandria, all the way to Marsa Matruh. It's one of the bluest beaches in the world. The
whitest sand you could ever imagine. It's so funny that you say that, Eamon, because when I first went to Egypt, I couldn't wait to go to Alexandria because I was imagining, you know, I had a romantic notion of what Alexandria was based on books I've read, based on, you know, stories that you hear about Alexandria and about the Greeks and the Italians and about the elegant architecture and about Alexander the Great and about the famous library. I just had this idea of what Alexandria would be. And when I arrived, this was in the early noughties,
I was totally disappointed because it seemed like... Not well looked after, I would say. It was not well looked after. The glories I was expecting to see were definitely gone. You should visit again because there is a renaissance happening there. Wow. Okay. Well, I will. But that kind of gets to the point that I'm trying to say, you know, with Egypt. I mean...
Has Egypt not been in decline, in some cultural sense at least, from its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, when it really was a glittering, glittering place? You know, all eyes were on Egypt. All of Africa, not just the Middle East, looked to Cairo as a sort of cultural capital. Do you know why it's in decline? Again, because what we said before in season one, monarchies. Monarchies tend to look after countries better than, well, you know, militaries or autocratic dictatorships.
So the CIA did really fuck up Egypt when they removed the fat fucker. I think the
I think the fucker was the CIA here, I think. Egypt has been a distinct geographical unit, a distinct nation, really, for over 5,000 years. The first Egyptian dynasty was founded in 3150 BC. This is impossibly old. So many dynasties, so many capital cities all built along the banks of the Nile, which...
is always shifting and turning as it winds its way through the desert. So they always had to build new capitals. Thebes, Memphis, Tannis, Alexandria, Fustat, and of course,
Cairo. All of these capitals, all up and down the Nile River, the Nile Delta. And in fact, that history continues because right now, east of present-day Cairo, between it and the Suez Canal, the Egyptian government is building yet another new capital. They announced it in March 2015. All government agencies will relocate it to this new capital. The plans that they've drawn up are unimaginably large.
Well, guess what? It is actually becoming a reality. If you look at the new satellite imagery, if you look at the new documentaries, if you look at the planning, goodness, it is really becoming a reality. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine from Egypt and he was telling me, you know what, you can come and buy, you know,
apartments and shops or whatever you can invest. And I said to him, well, actually, it is not out of the question. Egypt is an up and coming economic power. Definitely Egypt is experiencing an economic revival at the moment.
You could say that Egypt is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, which is ironic given the fact that this renaissance is causing it to enter into conflict with an African country up the Nile, Ethiopia, and its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Ethiopia is building a massive dam which Egypt opposes. Last August, in fact, President Sisi, the president of Egypt, said that all options were on the table to oppose this dam, including the military option. Should Egypt's water supply be in any way compromised by this policy of building a dam by Ethiopia?
Ethiopia's damming the Blue Nile. The Nile River starts in Ethiopia, the mountains of Ethiopia, and that gives the Ethiopians this tremendous sort of leverage over both Sudan and Egypt. If they screw up the waters of the Nile, that has an existential impact on Egypt, and President Sisi's not happy about it. Damn. Oh, man. Yeah.
Do you remember we talked before in the Yemen episode in season one about how the future conflicts in the Middle East are going to center around water? Water is becoming more and more a scarce commodity. And with food security threatened all over the world, you know, with this crazy, insane war between Russia and Ukraine. Goodness, I don't know where we are heading. You know, water security, food security. Yeah. Egypt is really in the firing line. Only around 5% of Egypt is habitable. The rest is brutal desert.
and Egypt's huge population of over 100 million people. They all live along the banks of the Nile. This is very different from Ethiopia, which is extremely mountainous, comparatively very fertile, and is, as I said, the source of the rivers up and down northeast Africa. Ethiopia's population is even larger than Egypt's. It's now pushing 120 million, and it's growing fast. But the
Because of this population growth, Ethiopia needs to overcome an electricity shortfall. And the new dam that it's building would quadruple their electricity supplies. And to add sort of to the geopolitical intrigue, China is actually building the dam. So I don't know. Is this going to lead to war, Eamon? Ethiopia has already started filling the reservoir. And Egypt feels that it really has to delay this filling. And to that end, it's acquired new missiles. Might they even attack the dam?
Well, look, we come back again to the politics of water and the geostrategic importance of water. When we talk about 105 million in Egypt, we have to add another 30, 35 million people in Sudan. And, you know, this population combined, almost 150 million people in
Egypt and Sudan are united in their opposition against this dam. And the negative impact it's going to have on Egypt. Egypt, the problem is, since the British influenced the Khediri of Egypt at that time to switch
many of the lands that were producing wheat and barley to producing cotton. Egypt at the time, of course, with only a population of 20 million, said, okay, you know, we already produce a surplus of wheat. We might as well switch to cotton, which is a very precious commodity at that time. However, as Egypt's population exploded,
There wasn't enough wheat, quantities of wheat that needs to be imported to make bread, which is the main staple for Egyptian people. That quantity became a burden, an exceptionally huge burden on the Egyptian finances to the point where at any given time, the amount of wheat that Egypt can store is only enough for six months. And if there are any crises,
in the supply of grains in the world, like what's going to happen over the next few weeks and months. Yes, the Egyptian government will be looking at the Ukrainian war with great trepidation because most of its grain comes from the Ukraine. Is that right? Ukraine and Russia and the population.
The problem is the Black Sea is a source of the grains. And at the moment, it's not so much just only there is a shortage of grain, but there is that sentiment gripping the suppliers and the major buyers. It means that the suppliers are holding on to their grains because the price of grain is going to rise. And guess what? In February alone, the price of grains rose by 13% per metric tonne.
13%. Things never change, really. I mean, all of modern Egyptian history, all of Egyptian history from the very beginning has revolved around dams, wheat, and waterways, whether the river or the canal. Now, we're going to start our brief summary of modern Egyptian history at the very beginning in 1798. When?
French General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded. There is a lot we could say about Napoleon's invasion of Egypt because the story is completely fascinating. It's one of those periods in history that is almost perfectly symbolic. I mean, Napoleon, the incarnation of modernity, of secularism, of faith in reason. So the invasion overwhelms the imagination. If there is a clash of civilizations between the modern West and the Islamic world, Napoleon conquering Egypt personifies it.
Remember, Thomas, that Napoleon's campaign in Egypt wasn't the first French attempt to conquer Egypt. I mean, Louis IX, you know, the French crusaders. But you see, all of these were called al-hamlata salibiyya, you know, the crusader campaigns. However, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt is not labeled as a crusade. I mean, no, they don't see it like this. The Egyptians always see it, both scholars and, you know, the average people.
as the French campaign, because it was entirely French. Yeah, of course. With French character, a French desire to challenge the might of the British in terms of trying to have Egypt as an access point from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean. Far from being a crusade, Napoleon actually pretended to convert to Islam when he was in Egypt in order to get the Egyptian population on side.
Indeed, Mr. Muhammad Napoleon. I mean, as you say, he didn't pull them, though. He didn't pull them. As you say, Napoleon did have geostrategic reasons for his invasion. France had lost most of its overseas possessions to Britain during the Seven Years' War a generation earlier, and Napoleon thought he could undermine Britain's control of India by establishing a French imperium in the Middle East. He
He was also attracted by the memory of an ancient route connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, not over land, but via ship. The Canal of the Pharaohs. The Canal of the Pharaohs. There actually was, all that time ago, a canal connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, just as there is today. The Canal of the Pharaohs brings up ancient Egypt, and Napoleon brought with him French savants who spread out across the country and unharmed
uncovered all of the riches, the archaeological riches of the Pharaonic period. Before this, people's knowledge of ancient Egypt was really limited. Classical writers had told them that Egypt was impossibly old, that it had been conquered in 525 BC by our friends from the last episode, the Persians.
And then by Alexander the Great, two centuries later, who was crowned pharaoh, proclaimed a god, and ushered in three centuries of Greek rule. Then the Romans grabbed Egypt. This is where the Antony and Cleopatra story comes in, and turned it into the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, which it remained, basically, until your friends, Eamon, the Arabs, conquered it from the Byzantines in the 640s.
Egypt's medieval history was pretty well known, too, since Egypt had remained a powerful cultural and economic center and played a big role in the Crusades, as you said. After the Muslim conquest, it took three or four centuries for Egypt to be fully Islamified. It was majority Christian until then, and it became the seat of power for a number of important Islamic dynasties, the Fatimids, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, until it was conquered by the Ottomans and turned into the breadbasket of
their empire, which is how Napoleon founded. But remember something. Throughout all of this, throughout all of this, Egypt was always regarded as a fortress of Islam because it not only was able to repel the Crusades and the Crusades' attempts to conquer it, but also it stopped the Mongol invasion. Yes, the Mamluks stopped the Mongols. Man, they were hard, hard warriors, weren't they? Yeah.
Well, I mean, they were slaves. And the word Mamluk means slaves. And they were slaves from two distinct regions in Asia. Well, Asia and Europe, if you can call it this way. The Mamluks who were brought from the steppes of Asia, you know, they were from Kazakhstan and former Soviet republics. And then you have the Mamluks who came from the Caucasus. So there were always these two
rival factions within the Mamluks. They were slave soldiers who then were promoted to high positions of power in the military. Now, in addition to factual history, if you like, Egypt had almost a mythological status in the imaginations of both Christians and Muslims because Egypt plays a central role in both the Bible and the Quran.
In the Bible, at least, I can speak from experience, Egypt is the ultimate symbol of this world as opposed to the next world, as opposed to the spiritual world. It's a symbol of the material world, of worldly wisdom, but also of corruption, sickness, delusion, and death.
and it was lorded over by the Pharaoh. In the Bible, the Pharaoh is the archetypal tyrant, the man who believes he is God, the summit of idolatry, pure, egoistic, haughty fallenness from which people need rescuing, salvation. He's almost like a symbol of the devil.
And in the Bible, God sends Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and into the promised land, which certainly early Christian fathers interpreted as the ultimate symbol of salvation, of redemption, of initiation into divine knowledge and virtue. Is that pretty much how Egypt is understood symbolically by Islam in the Quran, Ayman? Oh, yes. I mean, Egypt symbolizes materialism.
rejection of the divine, and this obsession with building monuments. But are they monuments in order to better people's lives? No, they are monuments in order to celebrate death and afterlife only for the pharaohs and their close circles and for the high priests. So it was almost like a death cult.
in a sense. This is how it's remembered. I'm sure Egyptologists would probably say, hey, hang on a minute. There was a lot more to Egyptian religion than that. But what we're talking about is how it's remembered by Christians and Muslims. I mean, and of course, in the end, Egypt was first utterly Christianified and then utterly Islamified. So, you know, but it remained nonetheless a symbol in the sacred scriptures of materialism, of death, of delusion, of idolatry. Yes.
However, since it became Islamified, Egypt now is always, even to this day, always being regarded as an Islamic fortress. It's the citadel of Islam. Seriously, this is how it's been viewed by many, many Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East. An Islamic citadel, Egypt certainly was and continues to be. And yet, modernity arrived, and it arrived hard.
In the end, Napoleon's adventure in Egypt ended ignominiously. He fled by foot up back to France and left his army behind to die there. Not really his greatest moment. In the end, the Ottomans regained control, sort of. The Ottomans sent an Albanian warlord,
Muhammad Ali to rule Egypt as their imperial governor, their viceroy. The era of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, well, it was during this era that the Suez Canal was built. It was opened in 1869. And building the canal had landed huge debts on the shoulders of the Egyptian state.
leading to increasing European intervention. They wanted their money back. The Europeans were forcing economic reforms to threaten the army's interests because then, as now, the army owned a huge amount of the Egyptian economy. So the army actually revolted in 1882 and French and British warships felt compelled to sail to Alexandria and shell the city. This provoked the Egyptian army even further and nationalist army officers took control of the government. They actually began nationalizing economic assets. This is in 1882.
very similar to the revolution that would happen 70 years later in 1952. To protect its interest in Egypt, Britain invaded with French troops alongside and quickly routed the Egyptian army. They never formally incorporated Egypt into the British Empire, but everyone knew who was in charge.
This history is fascinating, but I'm just going to quickly go through it. In 1919, there was a revolution which led in 1922 to formal recognition of Egyptian independence, although Britain still retained full military control of the Suez Canal zone and exerted a lot of influence in the country. It was in this period that Islamic modernism was born.
You know, we've talked a lot about Deobandism and its influence on modern Islamist movements. Deobandism, remember, which was rooted in resistance to the British in India. And in the last episode, Ayman, you remember we discussed the Iranian thinker Al-Afghani and his influence on the rise of Islamic modernism, on Islamism.
Alef Ghani called for modernization and reform within an anti-Western Islamic paradigm like Deobandism, and he would inspire perhaps the most important Egyptian Islamist, Hassan al-Banna. Amen. Hassan al-Banna, he's basically your idol, right? You love Hassan al-Banna.
Are you trying to provoke me here, Thomas? Seriously? Okay, look, look, look. I mean, in all honesty, I did actually admire Hassan al-Banna when I was growing up because his writings and, you know, the movement actually he founded was extremely influential, as we have discussed many times before in Saudi Arabia. And what was that movement, Ayman, just in case any listeners don't know? Well, the movement is called Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin, which means the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood.
So the Muslim Brotherhood were founded by Hassan al-Banna in the 1920s. And again, just like the Diobandis, it was in opposition to the British control of not only economic and political life, but also cultural encroachment of what they called creeping westernization of Egypt. Absolutely. And because we're talking ultimately about the Suez Crisis, there's a connection here because Hassan al-Banna, who was born in the Delta,
Once he graduated from university, he moved to Ismailiyah in the Suez Canal zone, where the Suez Canal Company was headquartered. And Ismailiyah at that time in the 1920s was infamously multicultural, cosmopolitan, and heavily Europeanized. So Hassan al-Banna saw with his own eyes what was happening to Egypt. It was being transformed, and he didn't like it. He began to preach against this in cafes.
And this attracted a following, and that following he soon turned into a formal organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, Amon, the Muslim Brotherhood, it was opposed to the Egyptian elite and their commitment to secularism and nationalism. And we have to remember, at this point in the 10s and 20s of the 20th century, the Egyptian elite was heavily secularized, heavily modernized.
They had adopted almost wholesale European customs and manners. Very, very, very provocative to a traditionalist like Hassan al-Banna. If you watch movies from the 1930s and 40s and 50s Egypt, I mean, you would think basically you are just watching
movies that were shot in, you know, in Greece or Italy or Spain, you wouldn't distinguish Egyptian, you know, downtowns, you know, from, you know, cosmopolitan places like Athens or Rome or Barcelona. I mean, it was a very Mediterranean society. It was a very Mediterranean society and more European than Middle Eastern in many respects, especially in the urban centers.
Another huge thing had happened a few years earlier, which had rocked the Middle East and was very important to the development of Hassan al-Banna's ideology. We've discussed this before. In 1924, the caliphate, which had had its center in Istanbul for centuries, was abolished. So the caliph, who claimed at least to be the leader of the whole Muslim world, was no more. How deeply resonant would this have been, Ayman, for an Islamist like Hassan al-Banna?
For people who idealized, you know, the office of the caliph, it was the ultimate calamity because for as long as Islam existed, since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, there has always been a caliph. Yeah, sometimes basically you have three caliphates existing at the same time. Not so different from the
pope of Rome. I mean, at points there were popes in Rome, there were anti-popes in Avignon, you know, it's just kind of a similar position. Exactly. But, you know, generally speaking, there was always one caliph in either Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, for as long as people remembered. And then the Ottomans came, and for the first time, the caliphate position was transferred in 1517 from an Arab to a non-Arab Turkic, you know, dynasty, which is, you know, the Ottomans. And
they kept that office from 1517 all the way until 1924. It was abolished. Now, for the Muslim Brotherhood, it's all about restoring the caliphate. For the Salafist Egyptians, who emerged also at the same time, it was about restoring the caliphate. And for a Jordanian scholar, his name is Taqiuddin Nabahani. He is the founder of the Hizb ut-Tahrir. It's also a movement that wanted to restore the caliphate and established in the 1920s and 30s.
It's something that unites most Islamists, restoring the caliphate. Exactly. Abu Lail al-Mawdudi and the Jama'at Islamiyah in Pakistan and India and the Muslim League in India, it's all about restoring the caliphate. So really, when people ask me, you know, did people really care about restoring the caliphate? And I will say, just look at how many groups, you know, emerged in trying to restore the caliphate.
Certainly in Egypt, a lot of people were attracted to Hassan al-Banna's ideas because by 1948, the Muslim Brotherhood had half a million members in 2,000 branches across the countries.
quite a remarkable explosion of membership. And the Muslim Brotherhood lent its voice, its organizational powers, and ultimately its fists to the cause of Egyptian nationalism, to the anti-British cause in Egypt. In 1936, the British and the Egyptians signed the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, which limited the number of British troops in Egypt to 10,000, and they were only there to defend the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal
I think it should go without saying, is incredibly important. All of the world's oil basically flows through it. Huge amounts of sea traffic in general. And apart from ensuring oil and food security for the world, it also generates huge revenues because to use the canal, you've got to pay. So it was a very important feather in the British imperial cap and they didn't want to give it up. So as I say, in 1936, they signed an agreement.
that they would keep their troops in the canal zone. And this really irritated Egyptian nationalists and the Muslim Brotherhood, forcing a renegotiation in 1945, but Britain refused to compromise. It would not give up military control of the canal.
Throughout this period, the British were working as close as they could with the Egyptian government and its king, Fat Farouk, and the Muslim Brotherhood was increasingly seen as a threat. So the prime minister outlawed the group in 1948. But then this prime minister was assassinated by a Muslim Brotherhood member. And in retaliation, after luring him with promises of a peaceful negotiation, the Egyptian secret police assassinated Hassan al-Banna on the 12th of February, 1949.
Well, that assassination is what led to a series of events that will culminate in the ousting of the king. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.
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That's right. So in 1950, elections were won by the WFT party, who were nationalists. The Muslim Brotherhood had boycotted the election, which is probably why the WFT party won. At this point, the situation was tense and the U.S. got involved, which is where Operation Fat Fucker comes in.
It was all about Suez, all about the canal and keeping shipping free of communist influence, especially the free flow of oil from the Gulf to the West. But the West had a problem. The country was in turmoil. Absolutely everyone, nationalists, communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, loathed the king.
Fat Farouk. Poor Farouk. I mean, we keep calling him Fat Farouk. Eamon, how is Farouk remembered today by the Arabs? I know of him. He's almost like a cartoonish character, plump, like a big overgrown baby, really, with his little fez eating oysters. Apparently he ate 300 oysters a day. Oh, my God. I mean, I don't know. I mean, how he was able to live for as long as he did. And in the end, actually, he died while eating. He died.
He died dining, yeah. In 1970 in Rome. But, you know, for all, you know, what people say about him, for a while, of course, the Nasserite, you know, and the Arab nationalists, they were always calling King Farouk like the gluttonous, you know, the greedy, the foreigner. He never belonged. Corrupt. Corrupt, all of this thing. You know, the stooge of the British. They never left anything, you know, that wasn't said about him. But in modern history, he is more...
fondly remembered. You mean more recently his image has been rehabilitated? Yes, it's been rehabilitated. People remember him as gentle, cultured, and wasn't a tyrant. Well, he wasn't a tyrant, actually. He really wasn't. He wasn't. Well, at the very end, he started to be, as we'll hear.
Well, I mean, he was trying to keep the country together because he felt that his gentle demeanor and his attempt to always rule by consensus because he was just too lazy to rule, to be honest, did actually lead to the state almost descending into chaos. So he was trying too little too late in the end to put the country together and applying some measured force there. But in the end, when there was an uprising against him by the army, how did he respond? Did he shoot back? No.
He, like a gentleman, abdicated with honor and left in his yacht to go and hunt down the best restaurants in the Mediterranean. LAUGHTER
Well, Fat Farouk's overthrow happened in 1952. It began early that year. The U.S. was becoming especially concerned. British troops in the Canal Zone were being attacked by communists and by the Muslim Brotherhood. And there were horrific riots in Cairo that were targeting foreigners. It wasn't a good scene at all. In this rising chaos, King Farouk began to
began ruling increasingly by decree, and the U.S. feared there might be a popular revolt against him, which would lead to Egypt being in the Soviet camp. So, as in Iran a year later, the CIA turned to the army. The Egyptian army already harbored within itself a group of young officers known as the Free Officers, who were very upset with King Farouk's rule, who felt utterly humiliated by the performance of the Egyptian army in 1948 against the nascent state of Israel.
which we will talk about in the next episode. So we can't really go into it now. So there was already talk of revolution in the air within the army. One of these officers was a man who would grow to be an absolute titan, an iconic Arab.
Gamal Abdel Nasser. When I say that name, Ayman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, what do you think? You transform me back to the age of Arab nationalism, anti-Western sentiment, anti-Israeli sentiment. You transform me back to the age when it was all about nationalism. It was all about Arab unity. But Nasser the man, Ayman, Nasser the man. Well, you know, basically a giant who fell from grace.
Don't skip to the end. Let's start at the beginning. We're in the 50s. This is Nasser in his prime. He's so handsome. He's so elegant, tall, immaculately dressed. Those eyes, those eyes. He was like a screen idol. He looked like Omar Sharif. I mean, he really looked like an actor. And he was elegant, effortlessly elegant. The way he talks, his
His charisma gripped millions upon millions from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and beyond. I mean, to the point where he had a fan club among world leaders. Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, all of these people. Tito in Yugoslavia. Absolutely.
People were just looking at him and thinking, wow, what a titan, what a giant. The man spoke English nicely, Arabic nicely. You know, when he dressed and he talks to the people, people just gravitated towards him. So was he a good speaker? Yes. Was he a good orator? Yes. Was he a good leader? That is yet to be discussed. Ha!
Well, his rise to power began on the 23rd of July 1952 when a project Fat Fucker was put into effect. The night before, the conspirators had taken over defense positions in Cairo secretly. They didn't
with no fighting. There was no blood spilled. The U.S. knew all about this. They had warned the British beforehand not to interfere. Any movement of British troops from Suez would be opposed with force. This was a serious, serious coup. Well, Truman wasn't kidding around. He already dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And the British were not going to oppose him.
Poor Farouk. It must have landed like a nuclear bomb in his lap because there he found himself ushered onto a boat and he swam away, never to be seen in Egypt again. Actually, I was in 2011. I stayed in the hotel, which was his palace. It's called the Palestine Hotel. Now it is a Hilton Hotel in Al-Muntaza Palace in Egypt.
Alexandria. So it was there where he was, you know, cornered by the army and was told, you know, hey, it's over. And so he said, okay, you know, I will abdicate in favor of my son, Fuad III. And of course, he will basically abdicate too. And then that's it. Like, you know, the rule of the Muhammad Ali dynasty came to an end. But it was so civilized.
not a single drop of blood, you know, was spilled. And actually, he was allowed to take his royal yacht. He was allowed to take a huge amount of cash and jewelry and money with him. And they gave him the 21-gun salute, national anthem, you know, singing for the last time. And the...
Goodbye, go enjoy your life in Europe. It wasn't just a goodbye to the Muhammad Ali dynasty. It was a goodbye to 5,000 years of royal rule in Egypt. And for the first time, Egypt was a republic. And for the first time in 2,500 years, an Egyptian ran the show. Exactly. For 2,500 years, not a single native Egyptian ruled the country. Since the Persian invasion in the mid-550s by Cyrus the Great,
The country was never controlled by its native population. Two and a half millennia. Oh, and don't forget, Thomas, that actually the Muslim Brotherhood lent their support to the Free Officer Movement. I mean, actually, for roughly two to three years after the 1952 uprising, there was a honeymoon period, actually, between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers Movement.
What was in it for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why did they support the Free Officers? I never quite understood that. The support for the Free Officers is the idea that the Free Officers would expel the British influence and with the promise that they will nationalize assets, including the canal, that belong to
Egypt because the free officers already had in their program these aspirations. It's just they didn't want to share power with a group of fanatics. That's how they view it. So the nationalist military officers had an alliance with the Islamists and their wide base within the population. So it was a marriage of convenience. But at some point, you can't share power
Because the Muslim Brotherhood were calling for elections. You know, there is the tiny, teeny little detail of, yeah, excuse me, officers, when can we have the elections? Nasser especially was opposed to elections. And he conspired to become the undisputed leader of the revolutionary movement. The details are complex, but in effect, Nasser would turn against the Muslim Brotherhood.
when they turned against his new constitution, which enshrined secularism. Obviously, this was very provocative to the Muslim Brotherhood. They could not accept a constitution for Egypt that enshrined secularism. So they organized street protests, which turned into riots. And so Nasser banned the Brotherhood in early 1954. He's on the rise, and his trajectory is completed on the 26th of October of that year, 1954, when during a speech broadcast live on the radio,
He survived an assassination attempt. Now, this is interesting. He blamed it on the Brotherhood, just like, if you remember, the Shah in 1959 had blamed his assassination attempt on communists. But in fact, it may have not been the Brotherhood.
There are some suggestions that it wasn't the Brotherhood because to this day they deny it. And to this day they say, really, we had nothing to do with it. And the evidence based on some documents released from the British intelligence and diplomatic archives suggests that it might have been a communist plot all along.
In Iran, however, it was the Islamists who wanted to assassinate the Shah, but he blamed it on the communists. So there you have it. Well, yes, certainly Nasser blamed the Muslim Brotherhood. He ordered a massive crackdown against them. It's at this point that the infamous Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, is jailed.
Nasser's crackdown on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at that time was so brutal that the ramifications of that crackdown still lives with us today.
And I hang my head in shame, Ayman, because my country had so much to do with it.
4,000 Muslim Brotherhood members died in jails because of the torture. And I can't go into details because it's so graphic. But what I'm saying here is that in these jails, the beginnings of the ideology that is the root of ISIS
and Takfir and Al-Qaeda and all the other jihadist groups began, Mustafa Shukri and others, who started excommunicating the entire societies. I mean, this is where, you know, Nasser's prisons gave rise to ugly Islamism as opposed to the, you know, more malleable Islamism with the Muslim Brotherhoods.
And yet, after the Muslim Brotherhood crackdown, Nasser was supreme. The week before, he'd actually finally got Britain to sign an agreement promising to evacuate their troops from the Suez Canal zone in 20 months' time. He gave them 20 months to leave. A new era was opening in Egyptian history. Nasserism is the name that we give to the political ideology that informed Nasser's rule. Nasserism. It was a revolutionary regime.
He abolished parliament and political parties. He associated political parties with corrupt monarchical rule. He thought political parties served the interests of landowners and the liberal upper middle class only.
Nasser thought that a multi-party system would lead to, quote, one party acting as an agent to the American CIA, another upholding British interests, and a third working for the Soviets, unquote. Isn't this ironic? This is actually shrewd. Isn't this ironic, actually, Thomas? You know, since he himself was helped by fat fuckers, like, you know what I mean, to come to power for the CIA. It's true, but
But it's also shrewd because it is basically what had happened in Iran in the late 40s and early 50s. He had watched this exact thing happen within Iran. One party pro-British, one party pro-American, one party pro-Soviet. So he was no fool, Nasser. Yeah.
The revolution first focused on attacking landowners whom he called feudalists. The officers saw these people as opposed to modernization with reason. And so they broke up their large estates into smaller parcels and distributed them to their tenants or to other landless peasants. But at first, the revolution was kind of moderate. It didn't attack businessmen. It didn't attack industrialists. It wasn't like a full-blown Bolshevik revolution or anything.
because businessmen and capitalists were urban. They were westernized. They supported modernization. So Nasser supported them, but he wouldn't always do that. Eventually, he turned against them too. The country adopted a much more Soviet model of economic modernization. In 1961, for example, all financial institutions and all industrial concerns were nationalized. I mean, that is quite an extreme move. Absolutely. Do you know what happened, actually? That move...
In a lost Egypt, one of its most important communities, which was the industrialist as well as business and trade communities, the Italians and most importantly, the Greeks. There were almost 1.3 million Greeks and Italians living in Alexandria and surrounding areas, and they were all
forced to leave. They migrated to Australia, to New Zealand, to America, to Canada. You know, like when you go to Melbourne in Australia, they have one of the largest Greek communities in the world. In fact, the second largest Greek community in the world after Greece itself. And what they will tell you is that most of them came not from Greece directly. They came from Egypt. They came from Alexandria. And they remember Alexandria with such fondness.
They remember it as, I thought I was going to experience it when I visited. I wanted to see Greek Alexandria. Yeah, you missed it by 30 years, mate. Nasser's ideology eventually grew into something called pan-Arabism. He thought that all the Arabs should be united under one.
one large nation state with Cairo as its capital and him as their president. Now, Eamon, you're always saying that you're a supporter of the nation state. Is there any universe where Nasser's dream of uniting all the Arabs under one banner in one big nation state would be for you an ideal? No, I tell you why. Because first of all, every nation has their own priorities, has their own national character, distinct priorities.
traditions. You cannot just basically force this kind of union. You can have a confederation, you can have a sort of a trade and to some extent diplomatic union, just like the EU, but you can't force them, you know, to be under one... But define nation, Eamon. Define nation. In the 50s, people were saying the Arabs are one nation.
That was a little bit of a stretch because the Arabs were never one nation to begin with, except under the caliphate of the Umayyads and to some extent the Abbases, and then they were fragmented. The reality is that you can't say that the North Africans, with the exception of Libyans, Libyans are mostly Arab by DNA because there are Arab tribes who settled there mostly. But if you talk about Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, they aren't Arabs, they are Berbers.
You know, the number of Arab tribes who are originally from Arabia there, they are a minority. The majority are Tamazigs. And if you look at Egypt... And Lebanese, Syrians, you're going to tell me they're Phoenicians. Yeah, well, not all of them, basically. Lebanon, yes, but I would say Syria because there are so many Bedouin Arabs there. Jordan also, so many Bedouin Arabs. The Palestinians are a mix of Arabs and Phoenicians and
you know, Philistines. But if you look at the Egyptians, there was a study that says basically that only 17% of the Egyptian population is actually Arab by DNA. But are nations forged by DNA, by genetics? I mean, I thought nations are equally a question of culture, religion, and certainly language. I mean, this is the big thing. All of the Arabs speak Arabic. So aren't they one Arabic nation? I'm sorry to my Algerian and Moroccan viewers.
and Tunisians also. I don't understand a word you say, so you're not Arabs. Sorry. Harsh. Wow, below the belt. Hey, I'm just kidding. Anyway, what I'm saying here is you just cannot lump
nations like this together without having to address significant difference in subcultures here. And this is what he was trying to do. He was trying to unite Syria with Egypt, but that was a short-lived union. He was trying to unite Yemen with Egypt by force. It just didn't work. And the same thing, the Saudis loved the idea of monarchy. People of Arabia loved the idea of monarchy, that a king
can rule and have legitimacy more than, you know, basically someone who appointed himself because he know how to speak and dress. Again, we come back to the one man show, you know, was working on the Egyptians, on the Syrians, on the Iraqis, but not on the people who actually wanted to be ruled by monarchs. It's the clashing ideas of how governance should be, you know, implemented. A clash of civilizations, even. Who knows? Maybe, well, maybe, maybe.
I mean, in fact, this idea of a pan-Arab nationalist seeking to use the military to unite people he thought shouldn't be divided has some echoes down to the present, wouldn't you say? Perhaps in the battlefields of Ukraine? Absolutely. I mean, oh, you know, I have Russians there just because they speak Russian doesn't mean basically they belong to Russia. Excuse me, just because Kuwaitis are exactly the same tribes of the Saudis that Kuwait should be absorbed into Saudi Arabia.
Otherwise, where does it stop? Where does it stop? Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism would have big Cold War consequences. And as we're racing towards the Suez Crisis now, let me just lay out the Cold War regional chessboard at the time. I know I have these long historical rants, but they're useful. They're useful. Stick with me. First, the Soviet Union. It actually had no real presence in the regions.
but it was looking for a foothold, mainly to upset America's designs. Then you have Nasser and Arab nationalism in general. This player of the game hated Britain and France for colonialism and for supporting Israel. Then you have Britain and France. They were both declining colonial powers, desperate to maintain some military control of these newly independent states in the Middle East. France was particularly angry at Nasser's support of revolutionaries in Algeria, which they ruled.
As for Britain, Churchill had actually just returned to power there after a six-year absence, and he wanted to preserve what was left of the British Empire as best he could. Oil security and countering Soviet expansion made both Britain and France allies of the U.S. But the U.S., under Eisenhower, who had just arrived on the scene, was anti-colonial. It supported nationalism instead.
And this put the US at odds with its British and French allies. Now this is interesting. Churchill and Eisenhower actually met in New York in early 1953 to discuss Middle East policy. Churchill was looking for an agreement from Eisenhower that in any Middle East conflict, the US would act jointly alongside the UK. But Eisenhower said no. The United States would be supporting Arab nationalist ambitions.
Eisenhower referred to how the British had screwed up the situation in Iran under Mossadegh. At this point, Iran is in the midst of its downward spiral, which led to the coup. And Eisenhower said, quote, Nationalism is on the march and world communism is taking advantage of that spirit of nationalism to cause dissension in the free world. Moscow leads many misguided people to believe that they can count on communist help to achieve and sustain nationalistic ambitions.
So Churchill did not get the agreement he was looking for from Eisenhower. And in May of 1953, with all that in mind, his new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, traveled to Cairo to talk to Nasser about joining a new military pact, one like NATO, but for the Middle East. In time, this would be called the Baghdad Pact, and Nasser wanted nothing to do with it.
In his mind, Britain was the target. He didn't want to be in a military alliance with the U.S. and Britain because Britain was an occupying power. What did Nasser care about the Soviet Union? It was 5,000 miles away. How would such a pact with America be different from what Britain was already doing to Egypt? Nasser said to Dulles that he wanted to be neutral in the Cold War. Ha!
Well, Eisenhower might have supported nationalist ambitions, but he didn't support anyone's neutrality in the Cold War. And so the U.S. reacted exactly as you'd expect, badly. They were pissed off and made two massive errors with big geopolitical consequences. First, the U.S. refused to sell Nasser any arms to help him modernize the Egyptian army.
So instead, Eamon, who do you think he turned to for his arms? You know, there are only four vendors at the time. The US, France, UK, and the Soviet Union. Of course, we can exclude the first three, so there is only the Soviet Union. Indeed, he turned to the Soviet Union, which helped him broker an arms deal with Czechoslovakia in September of 1955. This must resonate down to the present. I mean, the Middle East is still a good market for Russian weaponry, isn't it? Not as it used to be. I mean,
there has been a significant decline now. But yes, up until 20 years ago, it was a good market, but not anymore. But what about all the infamous weapons markets in Yemen, for example, selling cut rate Kalashnikovs and things? I mean, in the old generation, there are still lots of Russian guns floating around. If you are talking about small firearms, yes.
You know, they are popular and they are reliable and they are good. But also they've been declining because the American war in Iraq and, of course, the fight in Syria and other places opened up the market for American small firearms. They are as popular now as AK-47s. Oh, that's good news. Yeah.
So the second massive blunder that America made with Nasser was in relation to a major prong of Nasser's development program, which I said was modernizing agriculture. He wanted to build, and here we go, a massive new dam in Upper Egypt in the south at Aswan, the Aswan Dam. It would allow Egypt to fully control the flooding of the Nile River, enabling what Nasser thought would be better irrigation and higher yields. Sadly, in fact, it's turned out to be a massive tragedy for Egypt.
Absolutely, because actually the natural minerals and the sediments that the river actually brought with it all the way uninterrupted by any dam is what made Egypt more fertile. Actually, the dam caused a significant drop in the ground fertility since then.
Well, the 1950s were all about big projects that were going to overcome nature. Yeah. And when Nasser turned to the World Bank asking for a loan to help him build his dam, the U.S. imposed conditions which in his eyes amounted to controlling the whole Egyptian economy, i.e. the same sort of deal that the French and British had demanded from the Khedive 100 years earlier for building the Suez Canal. So Nasser said, look, if the World Bank won't help me finance my dam, I'm going to have to raise my own money.
And on the 26th of July, 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal.
massive, massive punch in the face to the British. And it was all very well staged on TV while he was doing a TV address. He was addressing a group of ministers and a group of politicians. And then, you know, he gave the secret word, you know, to his secret service to go and occupy all the sensitive parts of the zone, of the canal zone. And then they took it all
And then once the signal came to him that the complete takeover of the canal has been achieved, he said to the people he was addressing that now I can address that the canal has now fallen into Egyptian hands. And he announced the canal to be a public Egyptian company.
It was also perfectly timed because only one week before, Britain had completed its promised evacuation of the Canal Zone. So it was the engineers. It had withdrawn all its troops. Yeah, but the engineers were there still. It was completely run by engineers and by, they call them pilots. They are not pilots, you know, aviation pilots. They are actually water canal pilots.
who can guide the ships through the canal. Secretly, he was already training Egyptian pilots, Egyptian canal pilots, basically, to guide the ships through the canal. So the takeover was seamless, almost. Well, Nasser's nationalization of the canal was provocative both to Britain and France. And the two countries initially...
planned separate Egyptian invasion campaigns. And this is because France wanted to include Israel in the invasion, but Britain didn't want to do so. It didn't want to offend Arab opinion in Iraq and Jordan. So initially, Britain refused to work with France on that plan. Israel, and again, we're going to talk about Israel in the next episode, so I don't want to go too much into it here, but they wanted the Gaza Strip. It was then held by Egypt, and the Egyptians had been attacking Israel from it.
So they really wanted the Gaza Strip, and they also wanted, if possible, to get their hands on the Sinai Peninsula too, to protect the Gulf of Aqaba, through which Israeli shipping was going from the port of Eilat. So Israel was on side. They were itching to invade along with the French. It took some time for Britain to be talked into it, but on the 24th of October, 1956, the three countries signed what's called the Protocol of Sèvres in France. They agreed to work together. They agreed on
an invasion of Egypt. The 29th of October, 1956, they launched. This is, in the West, it's known as the Suez Crisis. In the Arab world, it's called the Tripartite Aggression. Absolutely, yeah. A much more accurate name. It had three stages. First, Israel invaded through the Gaza Strip and into Egypt proper. While they did so, the British and French provided air support from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and then began to bomb Egyptian positions.
Their goal was to destroy the Egyptian economy. I mean, it was really brutal. In response, Nasser closed the canal, which obviously made the whole world sit up and notice world shipping was dependent on the canal. Britain and France, to the last minute, assumed that when push came to shove, the U.S. would support them.
However, they were disappointed. Eisenhower did not stand by his allies. He condemned the invasion of Egypt because he felt he couldn't risk alienating the Arabs and pushing them into the hands of the Soviets. So the U.S. drew up a resolution in the U.N. Security Council. And get this, look at this politics, Security Council politics, you won't believe it. The U.S. draw up a resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its troops from Egypt. What?
But this was vetoed by Britain and France. This is not how the Security Council usually works. Yeah. And actually, this is the first and maybe the last time, you know, the U.S. stood against Israel. The U.N. Security Council route didn't work. And so the Soviet Union got involved. Khrushchev, the premier, actually threatened to use his newly acquired nuclear weapons, which was really too far for Britain and France, for the invaders. And so they canceled it.
and withdrew. The fighting had gone on for just over a week. 4,000 Egyptians died, including 1,000 civilians. The Israeli, British, and French side had far fewer casualties. So the Suez Crisis, not a shining moment for Britain and France, would you say? Well, I mean, I think also at that time, if Churchill was in charge, maybe he would have been more cautious, but because it was Anthony Eden...
Yes, Churchill had resigned and been replaced by Anthony Eden. Yeah, and he had a promising career and it was Suez which ended him.
Suez really redounds into the present day. It's become almost a byword for a late imperial overstretch, the sort of last gasped attempt of a dying empire to shore up its interests. It was certainly the point when the U.S. was firmly situated in control of the Western world's affairs. If the U.S. said no, you didn't do it. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
But on the Egyptian side, Nasser emerged from the Suez Crisis more powerful than ever. He was in his glory. And he moved from one success to another. I mean, he had undermined the Baghdad Pact,
He had negotiated his Czech arms deal, basically wrestling out from under any Western military oversight. He nationalized the Suez Canal successfully, and then he won a war against Britain, France, and Israel. I mean, this is amazing. The Arab world erupts in jubilation and joy. They think, we're on our way. We are going to be shoulder to shoulder with the West and with the Soviets. It was a heady time.
Now, the Suez Crisis had a huge impact on the Cold War. On the one hand, Nasser turned against the West more or less decisively, which gave the Soviet Union that foothold they had always been hoping for in the Middle East.
And for the next 20 years, informally at least, Egypt was a partner of the Soviet bloc. America had really shot itself in the foot. I mean, they should have worked closer with Nasser. They should have done what they said they were going to do to Churchill, i.e. support nationalist ambitions. But in the end, they didn't. They really supported their own Cold War interests. It meant that where they weren't before, the Soviets now were the Middle East. And then what's ironic is
is that the Soviet presence in the Middle East led to what's called the Eisenhower Doctrine. In 1957, Eisenhower said that the United States Army would do whatever it took to quote unquote, "stand against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism." - Yeah.
So five years earlier, he's telling Churchill, we are not interested in any imperialism. We support nationalist ambitions, but suddenly they're going to intervene militarily if any independent nation allies with the Soviet Union. The logic of empire is very hard to avoid, I think.
And so as a result of Nasser's actions, the Cold War is hotter than ever right in the Middle East. We are going to continue this story next time when we talk about Israel-Palestine and move into the 1960s. Nasser will come back, but we're leaving him in his glory. We will next tell the story of his... Let him enjoy it a bit. Let him enjoy it. I think based on what we've been discussing today, we're now in a position to see the Cold War not
so much as an East versus West conflict, which is how it's usually understood. But as a conflict between different colonial powers over the colonized world, you have the old colonial powers on their way out and new colonial powers on their way in. And I must say, especially the United States, the Soviet Union was more opportunistic, more reactive. It was the United States that felt it needed to ensure that the Middle East and
and other states that were bordering the Soviet Union remained outside of Soviet influence and would inexorably adopt imperialistic techniques and imperialistic strategies to achieve that end. The great game between Russia and the British was just continuing between the Soviets and the Americans. And who in the end pays the price?
the ordinary people, as always. That makes me think of the present, Eamon, and I, you know, my thoughts aren't particularly well formed about this, but I do see in the Suez crisis so many echoes of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine and really between Russia and the West, you know, where on the one hand, I mean, here's what I want to say, Eamon, frankly,
The sort of language that Eisenhower is using to Churchill in that meeting in 1953 in New York is sort of similar to the contradictions of American rhetoric today. You know, America says that it supports independence. Big empires or big hegemonic powers, they claim to support the independence of countries
when it suits their aims. And when it doesn't suit their aims, they don't. So right now, the United States is making a lot of fuss about the sovereignty of Ukraine. Similarly, in 1956, the Soviet Union made a big fuss about the sovereignty of Egypt. And it said, we cannot have this unlawful invasion of Egypt by Israel, France, and Britain.
But that very same year, the Soviet Union had rolled its tanks into Hungary and crushed an uprising there. Absolutely. So what does this tell us? I mean, it makes me quite cynical, I must say. First of all, if you are looking for honesty, you know, with politicians, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you're right.
I mean, one must be deluded to think basically that you can trust world leaders. I mean, look, in my opinion, what Putin is doing right now, he is actually maybe repeating the Swiss crisis, the Ukraine crisis are going to be maybe he's undoing. Totally. He is actually, and there is another NASA rising.
Zelensky, which is the president of Ukraine. An aggression against his country could actually turn him into a symbol of resistance, a symbol of independence, a symbol of nationhood. I agree. I think the Suez crisis really is a good metaphor of what's going on now. I've been thinking that one way of understanding Putin's move here is as the last gasp of
the Russian empire, a 500-year-old state structure, the last gasp of an empire on the way out, just like Britain and France invading Egypt was for them. He is living in a world of delusions.
Well, there he is dreaming of bringing the czar back. And in 1956, in Nasser's prisons, Islamists dreaming of bringing the caliph back. Exactly. The echoes are almost creepy. As far as our clash of civilizations theme goes, you know, Islamism versus modernism, there you have it right there. Nasser is in his glory, but in the bowels of his increasingly despotic regime are men nursing a ferocious ambition to throw off the West and bring back the caliphate.
Next time we're going to talk about Israel. My goodness, there's a massive clash of civilizations dimension to that. It's a multi-dimensional clash of civilizations there. It's a fist fuck of civilizations. That's my last time of using the F word, I swear, in this series. Absolutely, absolutely.
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