Mohamed Naguib
Mohamed Naguib was the first president of Egypt, from the proclamation of the republic on 18 June 1953 to November 1954, when Nasser removed him and put him under house arrest in a villa at Marg outside Cairo, where he stayed for thirty years. He was the general whom the Free Officers, all of them majors and colonels in their thirties, chose in 1952 as the face of a coup that needed a senior name, the one general who had come out of the Palestine war of 1948 with honour, three times wounded, and who had beaten the king's candidate for the presidency of the officers' club in January 1952, which was the coup's rehearsal. On 23 July 1952 he announced to the country that the army had taken power to clean it. He sent King Farouk into exile on his yacht from Alexandria three days later with a salute. He was, as chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, prime minister and then president, the most popular man in Egypt, the fatherly figure with the pipe and the moustache whom the crowds cheered. That was the problem, since Nasser ran the council and intended to run the country. He was born in Khartoum in 1901, the son of an Egyptian officer in the Sudan service and a Sudanese mother, went through the Cairo military academy in 1917, and took a law degree while serving. He wrote, and rose slowly, a brigadier by 1948 and the commander of the frontier corps and then the infantry. The quarrel of 1954 was about whether the officers would return the country to parliament and parties, which Naguib wanted and the Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood backed, or keep it, which Nasser wanted. In February the council dismissed him, and the cavalry and the street brought him back within the week. By April Nasser had the army, the unions and the Brotherhood's hostility to the old parties on his side. In November, after the Brotherhood's attempt on Nasser's life at Alexandria, the council abolished the presidency's occupant and Nasser took the office in 1956. He was kept at the villa with his family under guard, his name removed from the schoolbooks and the revolution's photographs, until Sadat released him in 1972. He published his memoirs, I Was President of Egypt, in 1984, the year he died in Cairo. He was buried with military honours as the first president, which the country had been told for thirty years he was not.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1984 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: president, general, revolutionary
