Nasser, Suez, and the Muslim Brotherhood
As Nasser moved to nationalise the Suez Canal in 1956, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was forced to choose between faith and freedom.
In the mid-1950s, as Cairo buzzed with tense negotiations over the fate of the Suez Canal, a different kind of battle smouldered beneath the scorching sun of the Western Desert. In the large prison camp known among locals as ‘Wahat’, recently imprisoned members of the Muslim Brotherhood were engaged in an internal war of belief and loyalty. As President Gamal Abdel Nasser prepared to defy the West by nationalising the Suez Canal in 1956, the Muslim Brothers faced their own reckoning: should they support a regime that had brutalised them, simply because it now claimed to defend the homeland?
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