materials that figure prominently in a reconstruc-
tion of the history of Naqshbandis in the region.
Today branches of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order
exist in Turkey, Bosnia, syria, pakistan, India,
bangladesh, aFghanistan, indonesia, malaysia,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Britain, and
the Americas.
See also haqqani, mUhammad nazim al-;
reneWal and reForm movements; shamil; sUFism.
Megan Adamson SijapatiFurther reading: Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the
Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the
Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998); Elisabeth Ozdalga, ed., Naqsh-
bandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and Continu-
ity (Istanbul: Curzon Press, 1999); Vernon Schubel,
“Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstruction of the
Naqshbandi Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan.”
In Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and
Continuity, edited by Elisabeth Ozdalga, 73–87 (Istan-
bul: Curzon Press, 1999).
Nasser, Gamal Abdel See nasir, Jamal abd al-
Nasir, Jamal Abd al- (Gamal Abdel
Nasser) (1918–1970) charismatic president of
Egypt from 1954 to 1970
Jamal Abd al-Nasir was born on January 15, 1918.
The son of a lower-middle-class postal official,
Abd al-Nasir served with distinction in the 1948
Arab-Israeli war. As a lieutenant colonel in the
Egyptian army, he was the leader of the Free Offi-
cers, a group of mainly young officers in the mili-
tary from the lower or lower middle classes. The
Free Officers successfully overthrew King Farouk
on July 23, 1952, and established the Revolution-
ary Command Council, which became the ruling
political group of egypt. Abd al-Nasir was elected
president in 1956.
Abd al-Nasir was a strong nationalist, and his
secular policies quickly alienated him from the
mUslim brotherhood. In 1954, after an assassina-
tion attempt, Abd al-Nasir promptly purged the
organization, imprisoning its members and hang-
ing its leaders. While successful in the short run
in disabling the Muslim Brotherhood as an effec-
tive organization, the purges contributed to the
growth and development of Islamist movements
in Egypt and throughout the world—Islamists
such as sayyid qUtb (d. 1966), who even today
remains influential, were able to write and lay the
ideological groundwork for radical islamism. Abd
al-Nasir, however, remained immensely popular,
especially among lower- and middle-class urban
workers and rural dwellers in Egypt and in the
wider Arab world.
Abd al-Nasir accomplished a major achieve-
ment in reforming the edUcation system by mak-
ing it free for all Egyptians. This would eventually
backfire, however, as universities later became a
hotbed for breeding Islamic opposition. Abd al-
Nasir’s economic policies carried a socialist bent
to them, and another one of his achievements
was reforming land laws, limiting the size of land
holdings for large landowners and redistribut-
ing acreage to the lower classes; however, while
certain of his economic policies were popular
with many Egyptians, his regime became increas-
ingly autocratic as time passed. Ruling during the
height of the cold war, Abd al-Nasir leaned toward
the Soviet Union, which provided financial sup-
port for the construction of the Aswan Dam in- One of his most visible legacies, the Aswan
Dam introduced electricity to much of rural Egypt
but also created major environmental problems.
In 1956 Abd al-Nasir received wide acclaim in
Egypt and throughout the Arab world for seizing
the Suez Canal from Britain, and his popularity
quickly swelled as a symbol of pan-Arab national-
ism. As Abd al-Nasir’s status across the Arab world
increased, he sought to capitalize on his notoriety
by pursuing a foreign policy increasingly interna-
tional in scope. In 1958 Egypt and Syria agreed
to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), theo-
retically merging the two countries into a single,
K (^518) Nasser, Gamal Abdel