Postscript : Nasser’s Dream Refuses to Die : A new Nasserist party is on the move, 40 years after Egypt’s revolution. Its ideals are grounded in history.

These days there’s a new picture next to some of the endless images of President Hosni Mubarak that decorate many of Cairo’s shop fronts, office walls and telephone poles. The vaguely familiar visage has graying temples, a clipped mustache and a winsome smile. He is hailed on posters scattered around the city as the source of “freedom, socialism and unity” for Egypt.

He’s also been dead for 22 years.

Forty years after he and his fellow Free Officers ejected King Farouk and declared revolution in Egypt, the memory of Gamal Abdel Nasser refuses to die.

In recent weeks, the Egyptian government has taken unprecedented steps to turn back the legacy of Nasser’s revolution--a movement that propelled Egypt into ascendancy over the Arab world, thumbed its nose at the superpowers and turned millions of peasant farmers into landowners. The authorities have affirmed Egypt’s commitment to throw out the remnants of socialism and reverse most of the provisions of Nasser’s landmark land reform laws.

But at the same time, they have moved to legalize the first official Nasserist political party in two decades, viewing these followers of the late president as perhaps the strongest counter to a growing threat from right-wing Islamic fundamentalists.

Even as Egypt leaves the revolution behind, the specter of Nasser is very much on today’s political agenda. And in an Arab world that declared Nasser’s brand of pan-Arab nationalism officially dead after the bitter Gulf War, a new Nasserism is emerging.

Nasserists today are talking about economic and political cooperation, European style, instead of constitutional unity. Many of them are ready to talk peace with Israel, as long as it’s a comprehensive peace. They insist on reviving Nasser’s notions of social justice for the poor and independence from the West at a time when Western financial institutions are imposing tough free-market economic reforms.

“You still have the true believers, of course, but then you have on the other side a substantial group of people who appreciate that the world is changing, that Egypt is changing, that the Arab world is changing and their interest is not the reincarnation of the institutions that existed in Egypt in the 1950s and ‘60s but rather, what is the relevance of these principles in our changing world?” said Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, head of the Center for Political Research and Studies at Cairo University. “National independence, social justice--these are not vague ideological questions. These are important social and moral questions.”

The Egypt of the 1940s was bitter from decades of British control and explosively divided between the wealthy landowners--2% of the population owned 95% of the country’s wealth--and the Egyptian fellaheen who worked the fertile farmland around the Nile for minuscule wages. Nasser, a young officer from rural Upper Egypt, led a military coup on July 23, 1952, sending the British-backed King Farouk fleeing on his yacht. He and his cohorts confiscated property and businesses from wealthy landowners, opened schools and universities to free education, limited farm ownership to 200 acres and doled out small parcels of the land booty to the fellaheen .

The revolution spread throughout the Arab world as Nasser’s charismatic oratory boomed out on Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs radio, and colonial-backed rulers were toppled in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Nasser, facing off with the British and the French, nationalized the Suez Canal, then turned on his U.S. backers and accepted Soviet help to build the mammoth Aswan High Dam.

Nasser’s was a message of strength through unity for the Arabs, and even when the constitutional union between Egypt and Syria went sour, Nasser led the drive to create a giant pan-Arab military machine that would challenge the Israelis and throw them out of Palestine.

The Arabs’ humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967 was the beginning of the end. Though hundreds of thousands of Egyptians swarmed into the streets to beg Nasser not to resign after the war, anti-Nasser protests began within months, and when he died three years later, much of the old Arab dream died with him.

In his wake, he left an economy, nearly completely dominated by the state, that was overburdened with millions of civil servants and a truly nightmarish bureaucracy. Most state industries were losing money. Basic foodstuffs were affordable only because they were heavily subsidized by the government.

Like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Egypt--with Western help--has been struggling in recent years to throw off its socialist past and make the transition to a market economy. The massive Western military presence required during the Gulf War left largely discredited any remaining notions of Arab nationalism and Arab self-sufficiency.

Just how far Egypt has moved from the Nasser revolution became clear during the festivities last month to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Though Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party officially proclaims itself the heir of the Nasser revolution, Parliament Speaker Fathi Sorour enunciated the NDP’s moves away from much of what Nasser stood for.

Outlining the NDP’s commitment to a free-market economy, cooperation with the West, even a willingness to reconsider the historic requirement that half of Parliament be made up of farmers and workers, Sorour attempted to cloak these aims in a mantle of neo-Nasserism, calling up the old ideals of social justice, jobs and housing for the poor provided through a partnership between the government and a new class of private producers.

He talked about the new agricultural reform law, bitterly contested in the NDP-dominated Parliament, which rolls back Nasser’s historic land reform and calls for a gradual but steep increase in the minimal rent tenant farmers pay for their land.

“If there were goals for the July revolution that do not meet the higher benefits of the nation, then we will head toward new goals,” he said.

But Sorour cautioned that the Egyptian government is not going to protect the goals of the revolution in a new era by going back to the policies of the past. “It is unfair to the people that some . . . claim (that) achieving those goals has to be through . . . restricting ourselves to the original tenets of the revolution, because that means going back in time, depending on a clock that is out of order,” he said.

The Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, legalized only in April, claims an initial membership of 30,000 to 50,000 and predicts a following of half a million by the end of the year. It joins other functioning Nasserist movements in Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Jordan.

The Nasserists’ message here is that Egypt does not need to rely on the current $2 billion a year in U.S. aid, other foreign loans and imports--all of which come with political constraints.

Throughout the rest of the Arab world, neo-Nasserism is a message of Arab independence, economic cooperation and freedom for occupied Palestinian lands. Just how much the Arabs were ready for such a message was evinced in the popular support Iraqi President Saddam Hussein elicited for his message of throwing the foreigners out of Saudi Arabia and setting fire to half of Israel.

“Is Arab unity a political option? Categorically, no. But if you ask me, is that slogan still dormant in the psyche of the people and can some demagogue awaken it, I would say yes, it can be rekindled overnight,” Dessouki said. “Ideas don’t die. Dreams don’t die.”

Political analysts here say Mubarak and other Arab leaders have allowed the Nasserist movement to gain a new foothold because it could prove an effective counter to the alarming growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the region.

“Mubarak has decided that democracy is one way of defeating the Islamic trend, and the more parties the merrier,” one Western diplomat said. “The Nasserists have the advantage of being a non-religious party. They are a potentially powerful one but probably a controllable one.”

The new Nasserists have given up much of the revolutionary rhetoric and are talking about breaking down economic barriers between Arab nations, relying on Arab security forces for military defense and capitalizing on the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf for the benefit of all Arabs.

“We believe in self-reliance. In Sudan, we have 200 million acres ready for planting. If we can work together, we can find food for all the area. . . . If we can work all together, we can produce something,” said Mohammed Fayek, a former member of Nasser’s Cabinet and a leader of the new party.

That these goals may be illusory is only too apparent. Egypt and Sudan are in the middle of a hostile border dispute that overshadows a fundamental schism between Mubarak’s secular military regime and Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalist government. The wealthy Persian Gulf nations have balked at adopting an economic aid program for their poorer Arab neighbors, and a plan to use Egyptian and Syrian military forces to defend the Gulf in lieu of Western military aid is nearly dead.

But Nasserists say the fact that the road may be difficult does not mean it does not have to be traveled.

“The Gulf crisis is true proof of the need for the Nasserist ideology to accomplish Arab unity,” said Diaa Eddin Dawoud, secretary general of the new party and one of the original leaders of the revolution.

“We’re not a reactionary movement trying to turn the wheel of history back,” said Fayek. “The revolution was about progress. We still believe the principles of this revolution can solve most of our problems now, but when we talk about the new Nasserism, we look for the future.”