Diary #43
As the leaders of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) political apparatus broke the news to my father and his colleagues, shortly before it was aired to the public, regarding Egypt’s June 1967 catastrophic defeat, my father went back home fuming and tore down Nasser’s poster in his room. Later, he put up Mao’s. At the time, Mao’s ideas were trending among young leftists around the globe, who believed the propaganda about the goals of his “Cultural Revolution.” His books were available in Arabic, too, and not censored by the regime at the time.
But my father’s search for a communist group to join didn’t go anywhere for a year at least. All communist organizations were dissolved by 1964 to join Nasser’s ASU. Ironically, it was no one but Fouad Morsi himself, one of the leading Egyptian communists, who tried to convince my father not to resign and “abandon the revolution!” There was another prominent communist leader in the meeting, but unfortunately, I cannot remember his name. The meeting occurred at “Amānat al-Fikr wa-l-Daʿwa,” the ASU department that ran political education.
Stalinist communists ran political education for Nasser’s “Arab Socialism” because, beneath the banners and petty squabbles, there was hardly a difference between Stalinism and the radical nationalists’ ideologies in the Global South. Nasser was no exception.
To my father’s surprise, the university dean agreed to his request to travel and do his PhD in the Soviet Union. That dean was Abdel Aziz Hegazi, a notorious right-wing economist. Hegazi hated my father with passion. My father’s only explanation for approving his scholarship was that Hegazi wanted to get rid of him simply by shipping him to Moscow while reporting him (and actually he did) as a “communist” to al-Mabāḥith al-ʿĀmma (the forerunner of State Security Police).
Finally, my father left for Moscow in 1968. Meanwhile, Hegazi took up cabinet posts like treasury and foreign trade, before becoming the prime minister in 1974 and engineering the neoliberal transition under Sadat, al-Infitāḥ.
