The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923-1973

by Abdalla, Ahmed

• ISBN13: 9789774161995
• ISBN10: 9774161998
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-01
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ahmed Abdalla was born in Egypt in 1950. He received a degree in political science from Cairo University in 1973 and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1984. While studying in Egypt, he was president of the Higher National Committee of Cairo University Students, which led the student uprising of January 1972, and was a defendant in the trial of student activists in 1973. He died in 2006.