The Revolutionary Classroom: Education and State Building in Nasserist Egypt, 1952-1967

Soon after President Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s rise to power in 1953, Egypt, a relatively uneducated country with a low literacy rate, became the largest exporter of education throughout the Middle East. The post-colonial environment of the Arab world called for a new power balance, and Egypt had begun exercising its soft power influence in the region. This thesis explores the growth and development of Egyptian education in the fifties and sixties. It deals with the intersection of ideology, governing philosophy, and education. The first chapter observes Egypt’s domestic system of education following the 1952 Revolution. It portrays the role of the state in defining and enforcing the Egyptian citizen’s experience through tools of knowledge production, drawing on a variety of Arabic-language archival sources. The second chapter explores the exportation of this experience to the far reaches of the Arab world – the Eastern Arabian Gulf. It follows the politicized appointments of Egyptian teachers to Kuwait, the Trucial States, Qatar, and Bahrain. And it argues that, partially due to these teachers, Egyptian Arab nationalism pervaded the political atmosphere of the twentieth century Gulf. This thesis traces wider trends in Egyptian statecraft through the educational establishment. It argues that the revolutionary government used modes of knowledge production to project the state’s consciousness onto the mindset of the Egyptian citizen. It also displays the expansionist telos of this consciousness, following the trend of teachers exported as political state-builders throughout the surrounding Arab World.