[1952–Present] Republic of Egypt

The year is 1952. In the pre-dawn hours of July 23rd, the quiet of Cairo is broken by the rumble of tanks. This is not the sound of a foreign invader, but of Egypt’s own army. For decades, the nation has been a kingdom under the thumb of British influence, a place of immense wealth for a tiny elite and grinding poverty for the millions of *fellahin*, the peasant farmers who work the Nile's soil. But a group of young, nationalistic military men, the Free Officers, have had enough. Their leader, a charismatic colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser, remains in the shadows for now, but his voice and vision will soon define an era. Within days, the portly, feckless King Farouk is sailing into exile on his royal yacht, and the ancient land of the Pharaohs is reborn as the Republic of Egypt. The air itself felt different. On the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, the fez—a symbol of the old Ottoman and monarchical order—vanished almost overnight. In its place came a sense of collective purpose. The new government’s voice was Radio Cairo, and Nasser’s speeches, broadcast across the airwaves, became a soundtrack for the entire Arab world. He spoke of dignity, of Arab unity, of throwing off the last shackles of colonialism. His defining moment came in 1956. The Suez Canal, that vital artery connecting East and West, was still controlled by a British and French-owned company, a bleeding wound in Egypt's sovereignty. In a fiery speech in Alexandria, Nasser declared its nationalization. The crowd roared. It was an act of breathtaking defiance. Britain, France, and their ally Israel responded with military force, invading Egypt. Militarily, Egypt was outmatched. But on the world stage, it was a stunning victory. The United States and the Soviet Union, the new global superpowers, condemned the invasion and forced a humiliating withdrawal. For the first time in centuries, Egypt was the master of its own land. Nasser was a hero, not just in Egypt, but from Baghdad to Algiers. This new confidence was cast in concrete and steel. With Soviet funding and engineering, construction began on the Aswan High Dam. It was a project of Pharaonic scale, designed to finally tame the Nile’s annual flood, create the world’s largest artificial lake—Lake Nasser—and generate enough hydroelectricity to power a modern nation. It worked, doubling Egypt's electricity supply. But it came at a cost. The rising waters submerged priceless ancient temples, which were painstakingly relocated in a global effort of historic preservation, and displaced tens of thousands of Nubian people from their ancestral lands, a cultural trauma that echoes to this day. Life for the average Egyptian changed dramatically. Nasser’s policy of Arab Socialism saw massive land reforms, breaking up the vast estates of the old pashas and distributing plots to over a million peasant families. Key industries were nationalized, creating a large public sector and a new urban middle class dependent on government jobs. But this grand vision was shattered in six days in June 1967. A pre-emptive Israeli strike devastated the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, leading to a catastrophic defeat. Egypt lost the entire Sinai Peninsula. It was a national trauma, a crushing blow to the soaring pride of the Nasser years. The hero of Suez, a broken man, offered his resignation, only to be met with massive street demonstrations begging him to stay. He did, but the dream was tarnished. When he died of a heart attack in 1970, millions poured into the streets, their grief raw and overwhelming. Out of his shadow stepped his vice president, Anwar Sadat, a man many dismissed as a lightweight. He would prove to be one of the most daring and controversial leaders of the 20th century. In October 1973, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Sadat did the unthinkable. The Egyptian army stormed across the Suez Canal, shattering the supposedly impenetrable Israeli Bar-Lev Line. While not a total military victory, it was a profound psychological one, restoring the army’s honor and shattering the myth of Israeli invincibility. Having regained his nation's pride, Sadat embarked on an even more audacious path. He pivoted Egypt away from the Soviet Union and towards the United States. He launched the *Infitah*, or "Opening," dismantling Nasser’s socialist economy. Foreign investment and Western consumer goods flooded in. For the first time, Egyptians saw blue jeans and Coca-Cola as commonplace. A new class of super-rich entrepreneurs emerged, but so did rampant inflation and a widening gap between rich and poor. Then, in 1977, he stunned the world by announcing he would go to Jerusalem, to the enemy's capital, to seek peace. The resulting Camp David Accords in 1978 led to a peace treaty with Israel and the return of the Sinai, but it made Egypt a pariah in the Arab world. Sadat had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he had also signed his own death warrant. In October 1981, during a military parade commemorating the 1973 war, soldiers from his own army assassinated him in a hail of gunfire. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, promised stability. He delivered it, for thirty long years. Mubarak’s Egypt was a place of holding patterns. The population boomed, swelling from 44 million when he took power to over 80 million. The sprawling, unplanned neighborhoods of Cairo, with their red-brick skeletons of unfinished buildings, grew ever larger. An emergency law, in place since Sadat’s assassination, stifled political dissent. Corruption became endemic. Yet, beneath the surface of this enforced quiet, a new technology was taking root: the internet. Young Egyptians, born long after the revolutions and wars, were connecting on forums and, later, Facebook. They saw a world of possibility that was denied to them, their frustrations simmering under the watchful eye of the security state. The pot finally boiled over on January 25th, 2011. Inspired by a revolution in Tunisia, tens of thousands of young Egyptians, organized online, poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Their chant was simple and powerful: "The people want the downfall of the regime!" For 18 days, the square became a festival of defiance and hope. People from all walks of life—Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, men and women—stood together. After three decades in power, Hosni Mubarak resigned. The euphoria was absolute. But the story of a revolution is never simple. The years that followed were a chaotic whirlwind of a short-lived, divisive Islamist presidency under Mohamed Morsi, followed by another massive popular uprising and, in 2013, a military takeover led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Today, Egypt is again a republic led by a strongman from the military, much as it was in 1952. The state is pouring billions into megaprojects, including a vast New Administrative Capital rising from the desert sands. Yet the fundamental questions of freedom, economic justice, and political participation, the very questions that drove the Free Officers in 1952 and the youth of Tahrir Square in 2011, remain. The republic’s story, written in the waters of the Nile and the sands of the Sinai, is still being told.