The Free Officers had reached the point of no return. The risks of plotting against the regime were high. The Free Officers knew they would face charges of treason if they failed. They went over their plans very carefully: the simultaneous occupation of the radio station and the military headquarters. The mobilization of loyal military units behind the coup plotters. Measures to ensure public security and to prevent foreign intervention. There were many details to get right in advance of the coup date of July 23, 1952. The coup plotters were under close government scrutiny, adding to the intense pressures of the last days before the coup. General Naguib was warned by one of his officers on the eve of the coup that he was about to be arrested on suspicion of leading a conspiracy against the government. “I did my best to conceal my alarm,” Naguib confessed in his memoirs. He decided to stay at home that night, while the coup unfolded, claiming he was under surveillance and feared he might compromise the Free Officers? plans.⁹ Anwar Sadat took his wife to the cinema that night, where he got into a very noisy fight with another moviegoer and went to the police station to file a complaint—as good an alibi as a coup plotter could hope for in case of failure. ¹⁰ Even Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abd al-Hakim Amer surprised their supporters when they showed up for the coup dressed in civilian clothes (they later changed into uniform).¹¹ In spite of their doubts and fears, the Free Officers succeeded in orchestrating a near-bloodless coup. Rebel military units surrounded Egyptian army headquarters and overcame light resistance to occupy the facility by 2:00 A.M. on the morning of July 23. Once the headquarters had been secured, the military units supporting the coup were given the go-ahead to occupy strategic points in Cairo while the city slumbered. When the army had taken its positions, Anwar Sadat went to the national radio station and announced the coup in the name of General Muhammad Naguib, as commander in chief of the armed forces, completing what had been a classic coup d’йtat. Nawal El Saadawi was working in the Kasr al-Aini Hospital in central Cairo on July 23, and she described the exultation that followed on from the announcement. “In the wards the patients had been listening to the radio. Suddenly the music broke off for an important announcement which said that the army had taken over control of the country and that Farouk was no longer king.” She was astonished by the patients’ spontaneous reaction. “Suddenly as we stood there the patients rushed out of the wards shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ I could see their mouths wide open, their arms waving in the air, their tattered shirts fluttering around their bodies. It was as though the corpses from the dissecting hall had suddenly risen from the dead and were shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’” Indeed, even the dead were stopped in their tracks, as she saw a funeral cortege leaving the hospital brought to a halt by the news. “The men carrying the coffin put it down on the pavement and mixed with the crowd shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ and the women who a moment ago had been mourning the defunct started to shrill out [in celebration] instead of shrieks.”¹²

King Farouq and his government crumpled on July 23. Yet the Free Officers had little idea of how to proceed now that their movement had succeeded. “It was obvious that we hadn’t prepared ourselves, when we carried out our revolution, for taking over government posts,” Sadat reflected in his memoirs. “We had no ambition to be government ministers. We had not envisaged that and had not even drawn up a specific government program.”¹³ They decided to ask veteran politician Ali Maher to form a new government. The Free Officers had no idea what to do with Farouq himself: Arrest him? Execute him? Nasser made the wise decision to secure Farouq?s abdication and allow him to go into exile rather than risk tying up the new government with potentially divisive judicial proceedings or turning an unpopular monarch into a martyr through a messy execution. Farouq abdicated in favor of his infant son Ahmed Fuad II, under a regent, and was seen off by General Naguib on July 26 with a twenty-one-gun salute from Alexandria in the royal yacht Mahroussa. “I saluted him and he returned my salute,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs:A long and embarrassing pause ensued. Neither of us knew what to say. “It was you, effendim [My Lord], who forced us to do what we have done.” Faruk’s reply will puzzle me for the rest of my life. “I know,” he said. “You’ve done what I always intended to do myself.” I was so surprised that I could think of nothing more to say. I saluted and the others did likewise. Faruk returned our salutes and we all shook hands. “I hope you’ll take good care of the Army,” he said. “My grandfather, you know, created it.” “The Egyptian Army,” I said, “is in good hands.” “Your task will be difficult. It isn’t easy, you know, to govern Egypt.”¹⁴

General Naguib in fact would be given little chance to govern Egypt. The real leader in Egypt was Nasser, as would soon become apparent.

The Free Officers revolution represented the advent of a newer, younger generation in Egyptian politics. Naguib, at age fifty-one, was the old man in a movement whose average age was thirty-four. All were native-born Egyptians of rural origins who had risen through the military to positions of responsibility—much like the men around Colonel Ahmad Urabi in the 1880s. Like Urabi, the Free Officers chafed at the privileges and pretensions of the Turco-Circassian elites that had surrounded the royal family. One of their first decrees after taking power was to abolish all Turkish titles such as bey and pasha, which they believed had been conferred by “an abnormal King . . . on people who did not deserve them.”¹⁵ Stripped of its titles, the Egyptian aristocracy was next deprived of its land. The Free Officers initiated a major land reform, passing laws that limited individual land holdings to 200 acres. The vast plantations of the royal family were confiscated by the state, and some 1,700 large landholders saw their estates expropriated by the government, which reimbursed them in thirty-year bonds. In all, some 365,000 acres were seized from Egypt’s landed elite. These lands were then redistributed to small holders with no more than five acres of property. The program passed over the strenuous objections of Prime Minister Ali Maher, who represented a civilian elite whose wealth lay in landed property. The Free Officers valued mass support over the wishes of the propertied elite and secured Maher?s resignation in September 1952. The land reform measure secured tangible political benefits for the Free Officers. Although only a fraction of Egypt’s farming population actually benefited from the land reform measures of 1952—about 146,000 families in all, out of a total Egyptian population of 21.5 million—it engendered tremendous goodwill among the citizens of Egypt.¹⁶ With the backing of the Egyptian masses, the military men were emboldened to take the reins of power and play a more direct role in politics. Once the Free Officers entered politics, they proved very decisive. General Naguib agreed to form a new, largely civilian, government in September 1952. Nasser created a committee of military men to oversee the work of the revolution, ostensibly in collaboration with the government, but increasingly in rivalry with Naguib, called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The military men were quick to purge Egyptian politics of party pluralism. In January 1953, in response to pressures from the Wafd and the Muslim Brothers, the RCC banned all parties and expropriated their funds for the state. Working behind the scenes, Colonel Nasser introduced a new state-sponsored party known as the Liberation Rally. Nasser argued that party factionalism was largely responsible for the divisive politics of the interwar years. He hoped the Liberation Rally would serve to mobilize popular support behind the new regime. Nasser made the final break with the old order when the RCC abolished the monarchy, on June 18, 1953. Egypt was declared a republic and Muhammad Naguib named its first president. For the first time since the Pharaonic era, Egypt was ruled by native-born Egyptians. As Nawal El Saadawi put it, Naguib was “the first Egyptian to rule since King Mena in ancient Egypt.”¹⁷ The Egyptian republic was now a government of the people, and it enjoyed the full support of the great mass of the Egyptian people. “The atmosphere in the country changed,” Saadawi recalled. “People used to walk along with grim, silent faces. Now the streets had changed. People . . . chatted, smiled, said good morning, shook hands with complete strangers, asked about one another’s health, about recent events, congratulated one another for the change of regime, discussed, tried to foretell future events, [and] kept expecting changes to happen every day.” The challenge for the new government would be to meet the high expectations of a people eager for change. It would not be easy. The new Egyptian government inherited an intimidating array of economic problems. The country was over-reliant on agriculture, and agricultural output was constrained by Egypt’s desert environment. There was no way to expand the land under cultivation without the water resources for desert reclamation. Egyptian industry remained largely underdeveloped. Whereas agriculture contributed 35 percent of the Egyptian gross domestic product in 1953, industry contributed only 13 percent (with services accounting for the remaining 52 percent of GDP).¹⁸ The slow pace of industrialization was in large part due to low levels of public and private investment. Overall population growth well outstripped the rate of job creation, which meant that fewer Egyptians would get the steady jobs necessary for a significant improvement in their standard of living. The officers of the Revolutionary Command Council had a radical solution to all their problems: a hydroelectric dam on the Nile. Engineers had identified the ideal place for the dam in Upper Egypt near the town of Aswan. The new Aswan High Dam would store enough water to allow an expansion of land under cultivation from 6 million acres to between 8 and 9.5 million acres, and would generate enough electricity to permit Egypt’s industrialization and provide affordable electricity to the country as a whole.¹⁹ Such a project would cost hundreds of millions of dollars—far more than Egypt could raise from its own resources. To finance the Aswan Dam, and to secure Egypt’s economic independence, the ruling officers would have to engage with the international community. Yet Egypt was intensely jealous of its independence, and sought at all costs to secure its aims without compromises to its sovereignty. The Free Officers were soon to discover how hard it was to engage with the rest of the world without making compromises.