Gamal Abdel Nasser

Gamal Abdel Nasser was an Egyptian army officer and statesman who served as the second president of Egypt from 1956 until his death in 1970 and was the central figure of pan-Arab nationalism in the mid-20th century. He was born on January 15, 1918, in Bakos, a district of Alexandria, the son of a postal clerk from Beni Mor in Upper Egypt.

He graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 and served in the Faluja Pocket during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, an experience that hardened his conviction that the monarchy and the British military presence were the principal obstacles to Egyptian sovereignty. He was the leading organizer of the Free Officers Movement, which on July 23, 1952, overthrew King Farouk; General Muhammad Naguib became the first president of the new republic in 1953, and Nasser succeeded him in 1956.

His nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in July 1956 precipitated the Suez Crisis, in which Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt and were forced to withdraw under American and Soviet pressure; the outcome made him the dominant Arab leader of his era. He merged Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961 and pursued land reform, industrialization and the construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970 with Soviet assistance. He was a co-founder, with Tito and Nehru, of the Non-Aligned Movement at the 1955 Bandung Conference.

The defeat of Egypt and its allies in the Six-Day War of June 1967, in which Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula to Israel, was the central blow of his presidency; he resigned on June 9, 1967, and reversed the resignation the following day after mass demonstrations. He died of a heart attack in Cairo on September 28, 1970, immediately after the Cairo Arab summit, and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat.

His name Gamal (Arabic Jamāl) means "beauty"; it is a masculine name common in the Arab world, often paired with 'Abd al-Nāṣir ("servant of the Helper," a divine epithet).