History Of Radical Islam In Egypt: 1960 To Present

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Bryan Kurtz Professor Anderson SOC 130 ME 5/12/11 The Rise and Fall of Revolutions in Egypt Egypt is the world’s oldest complex civilization and has been one of the greatest centers of Arab culture during the past thousand years. A byproduct of this legacy has been that Egypt has had extensive experience with regime change and shifts in its social ideologies. Amongst these changes, Egypt was particularly volatile from the 1950’s to the present, where its political landscape had virtually traversed all ends of the spectrum. In 1952, radical nationalist officers led by Gamel Abdel Nasser known as the Free Officers movement, had successfully ousted the last pro-British king, in what is known as the Egyptian Revolution. During this time, Nasser created a strong nationalist government which enacted a wave of various social reforms that for the most part benefited the lower classes and gave distribution of land to the peasants. Due to his socialist sentiments, Nasser began to attract the attention of Russia, which aligned itself with Egypt in 1955 by financing the giant Aswan Dam along the Nile. The construction of the dam made Russia significantly more popular amongst the regime during this time, where capitalists and European powers had refused to partake in such a project. For several years, Nasser was able to operate with very little social resistance to his regime, until the 1960s, when the first elements of an Islamist movement began to assemble. Known as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brothers were especially effective because of their ability to muster widely different groups in support of its Islamic philosophy. As the numbers in their ranks began to swell, the brothers started to develop an ideal of an Islamist society that quickly gained the attention of Nasser. Nasser viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to
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