We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

A searing exploration of authoritarianism in the Middle East through the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s years in power in Cold War–era Egypt.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years between the coup d’état he led in 1952 and his death in 1970, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser’s regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today.
In We Are Your Soldiers , Alex Rowell focuses on seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya—to reassess Nasser’s impact in the Arab sphere. Drawing on a deep reading of Arabic sources, extensive interviews, and material never before published in English, Rowell offers a radical reexamination of Nasser’s rule and a new understanding of the politics of the Middle East.