Gamal Abdel Nasser, architect of Egypt’s 1952 Revolution, president of the country from 1956 to 1970, hero to millions across the Arab world since the Suez Crisis, was also a family man, a devoted husband and father who kept his private life largely private.
In 1973, three years after his early passing at the age of 52, his wife Tahia wrote a memoir of her beloved husband for her family. The family then waited almost forty years, through the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, both unsympathetic to the memory of Nasser, before publishing Tahia’s book in Arabic for the first time in 2011. Now this unique insight into the life of one of the giants of the twentieth century is finally available in English.
Accompanied by more than one hundred photographs from the family archive, many never before published, this historic book tells the story of Gamal and Tahia’s life together from their marriage in 1944, through the Revolution and Gamal’s career on the world stage, revealing an unknown and intimate picture of the man behind the president.
“At 6:30am on the morning of July 23, 1952 there was a knock on the door. Tharwat Okasha shook my hand and congratulated me: ‘The military coup has succeeded.’ I asked him about Gamal. ‘He is close by, not more than five minutes away at the General Command.’ At 9:30am an officer called: he had come from the General Command at Kubri al-Qubba, sent by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to tell me that he was fine and would not be home for lunch.”