"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves." Mama Harriet Tubman

The Egyptian Revolution began with the military takeover of the government in 1952 by the Free Officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser and lasted at least until Nasser's death in 1970. The Free Officers aimed not merely to replace at a stroke the corrupt regime of King Farouk by an honest government but, also to spend time carrying out fundamental changes in Egyptian society, and to overcome the country's chronic economic under- development and its political, economic and even cultural dependence on the West.

 

The Free Officers were deeply conscious of the disparity which the Industrial Revolution had created between Europe and the Muslim nations. For over a hundred years this disparity had produced ferment and unrest throughout the entire Muslim world. Some Muslim leaders had sought a remedy in a return to Islamic fundamentalism, the pure and stringent ideals of early Islam.

Others, like Muhammad Ali, the Turkish Viceroy in early nineteenth-century Egypt, believed that Islam was compatible with Western science, technology and philosophical ideas, and began the Islamic modernist tradition.

Gamal Abdul Nasser soon showed himself to be Muhammad Ali's successor in the modernist tradition, with the important difference that whereas Muhammad Ali tried to make Egypt a modern state as a satellite of the European economy, Nasser aimed at a self-reliant, economically independent country free of Western (particularly British) influence.