The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt: 1923–1973

The Nasserist revolution of 1952 had a massive impact on the Egyptian educational system. For the first time, the doors of university education were opened to masses of people in a Third World country, and hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, and lower-middle-class employees seized the opportunity. But quantitative growth was not matched by qualitative advance, and the gap between expectations and reality has rarely been so wide. The result was one of the world’s most turbulent student movements. This history of that movement’s most critical years, first published in 1985, was written by a young Egyptian who was a participant in many of the events and was intimately acquainted with them. Ahmed Abdalla describes the sociological composition of the student body, the physical and social conditions in the universities, the shifts in government education policy, and the attempts of the students to influence the direction of national development in both domestic and foreign policy. The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt is an important contribution to our understanding of Egypt’s modern history, and will also be of interest to anyone concerned with the more universal issues of higher education, social change, and state politics in the Third World.