We Are Your Soldiers: How Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World, Alex Rowell, Simon & Schuster, £25.

Gamal Abdel Nasser is now remembered principally for two things: facing down Anglo-French imperialism during the Suez crisis of 1956, and leading Egypt and its Arab allies to a disastrous defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967.

It should come as no surprise then that his legacy is contested. To the extent that both episodes, regardless of their outcome, have been seen as evidence of Nasser’s determination to defeat the enemies of Arab nationalism, Nasser still tends to be seen more as a heroic than a villainous figure in the Arab collective memory. In We Are Your Soldiers, Alex Rowell makes the case for a much darker legacy. In establishing himself as Egypt’s unchallenged ruler, Nasser instituted a model of revolutionary repression that he subsequently exported throughout the Arab world. The abolition of political parties, the intolerance of dissent, the murder of opponents, the establishment of an omnipresent intelligence and security apparatus were the key characteristics of Nasser’s model of Arab socialism, Rowell argues. These practices were imposed not just on Egypt itself, but on a succession of other states in the region, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya, either through direct Egyptian interference or through Egyptian example. Even in cases such as that of Jordan, where the Hashemite regime of King Hussein resisted Egypt’s embrace, Nasser’s hand was visible in the sponsoring of plots against the regime, most notoriously through the assassination of Prime Minister Hazzaa al-Majali in 1960.

The Nasser of Rowell’s account, then, is far from the cherubic-featured freedom-fighter of Suez-era fame. On the contrary, episodes such as Egypt’s repeated use of poison gas against the civilian population in Yemen during the civil war of the 1960s, which Rowell explores in graphic detail, reveal him ‘at his most unhinged, his most irrational, and most atrocious’. In his bid to repress the opposition to the Republican regime supported by Egypt in Sanaa, Nasser was willing to use any and every weapon at his disposal.

If this was perhaps the most notorious of Nasser’s foreign interventions, repression began at home. The Abu Zaabal prison camp, to which Nasser consigned many of his domestic political opponents, was dubbed the ‘Graveyard of the Living’ by its victims. In Rowell’s view it more than meets the definition of a ‘concentration camp’. Torture was routinely practiced on inmates, who were permitted no visits, no books, no pens and paper, no radios and no shoes. The food was inadequate and abominable and there was no medical care. Alongside torture, the inmates endured brutal forced labour in a neighbouring quarry. Many did not emerge alive.

This Nasser-inspired model for the repression of opponents was picked up and amplified by the Egyptian leader’s acolytes elsewhere in the Arab world. In Iraq, the Hashemite royal family and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, a key opponent of Nasser’s, were butchered in a July 1958 coup executed by a group of ‘Free Officers’ modelling themselves on Egypt’s example. Nasser’s response to the orgy of violence was that ‘the banner of Freedom is raised today in Baghdad’. From the revolution of 1958 to the Baathist coup of 1968, which paved the way for Saddam Hussein’s ultimate seizure of power, Nasser in Rowell’s view played an instrumental part in events in Iraq. ‘If Nasser did not literally install Saddam on the throne, he nonetheless did a great deal to create the conditions that enabled him to get there – not least during the three years he hosted, paid and protected him as his guest in Cairo.’

In Syria, Rowell argues, Nasser’s influence was if anything even more direct and malevolent. Between 1958 and 1961, Nasser ruled Syria as part of the United Arab Republic. ‘It was not a happy experience by anyone’s reckoning’, Rowell notes. In essence, Nasser took the apparatus of repression which he was in the process of developing in Egypt and ratcheted it up even further in Syria. Under the guidance of the man Rowell describes as the ‘torturer-in-chief’, the notorious Syrian intelligence officer, Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, political opponents, especially Communists, were rounded up and murdered. Egyptian rule and administrative practices were imposed on Syria without any concession for the local political environment. By 1961, a union which had begun with a wave of popular adulation collapsed in recrimination and bitterness. Nasser found the blow hard to take, mirrored in his continued styling of the rump Egyptian state as ‘The United Arab Republic’ through the 1960s, long after it was clear that the union could not be revived.

In Jordan, meanwhile, King Hussein’s decision, to throw his lot in with his Iraqi cousin, Feisal II, through the formation in 1958 of a Hashemite Arab Union intended to rival the United Arab Republic, drew down on him Nasser’s ire. When Hussein continued to chart a pro-Western course in the wake of the Iraqi Revolution, Nasser sponsored both unsuccessful assassination attempts against him, and the successful attempt on the life of his Prime Minister, Hazzaa Majali, in 1960. Although a rapprochement took place between Hussein and Nasser after their disastrous defeat in 1967, suspicion never lurked far beneath the surface of their relationship right up to the end of Nasser’s life in 1970.

If King Hussein of Jordan was one Arab leader who never fell under the spell of Nasser’s charisma, the opposite could be said of the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, who came to power through a coup against the Libyan monarch, King Idris al-Sanusi, on 1 September 1969. Gaddafi was an unabashed admirer of Nasser, and initially modelled his revolution in Libya on that which Nasser had undertaken in Egypt. Straight after Gaddafi had seized power, Nasser hurried to send an Egyptian team to Tripoli to advise the new revolutionary leader. In response, Gaddafi told Nasser’s media adviser, Mohamed Heikal, to let the Egyptian leader know that ‘we made this revolution for him’. ‘Now it is for Nasser to tell us what to do’, he pledged. Nasser lost no time in sending Fathi al-Deeb to Libya as his viceroy, to supervise Egypt’s day-to-day management of the new regime. Throughout the final year of Nasser’s life, Egyptian involvement in Libya grew, extending to all aspects of the country’s political, security, media and socio-economic affairs. This was accompanied by the inevitable purge of potential opponents.

Nasser’s personal and public endorsement of Gaddafi served to burnish his image and establish him, in his own eyes at least, as the Egyptian leader’s anointed successor. In Rowell’s view it is no coincidence that Libya under Gaddafi subsequently became a byword throughout the region for egregious despotism. ‘There is surely no more lurid example than Gaddafi of the dark side of Nasserism, and how it has all too often brought not freedom, dignity, and prosperity to the Arab peoples but the polar opposites of all three’, he argues.

Rowell’s conclusion is that Nasser’s baleful example was central in the establishment of Arab despotisms masquerading as republics from Egypt itself to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Even the Arab Spring of 2011, he argues, did not succeed in sweeping away the political vestiges of Nasserism, with the military re-asserting itself in Egypt after a brief democratic interlude, and Iraq, Syria and Yemen descending into civil conflict. There is much force in this argument, and Rowell certainly succeeds in bringing out the darker side of Nasserism, most notably through his description of Nasser’s chemical weapons campaign in Yemen. This study, therefore, provides a useful corrective to the image of Nasser as the idealistic standard bearer of Arab nationalism and shines a light on his divisive influence throughout the region. However, while Nasser’s example certainly loomed large, both during and after his lifetime, the longer-term causes of the political and social fracturing of the Arab world are much more numerous and complex than simply the legacy of one leader, however malevolent he may have been.