Muhammad Naguib - Early Years

Early Years

Naguib's full name was Mohamed Naguib Yousef Qotp Elkashlan; he was born in Khartoum, Sudan, which was united with Egypt at the time. He was the eldest of nine children of an Egyptian, Youssef Naguib, and a Sudanese woman Zohra Ahmed Othman. His family"Elkashlan" was popular in Egypt at that time of its Scientific personalities like Saad Elkashlan and Abdulsamad Elkashlan. He came from a long line of army officers, as his father was serving in the Egyptian army in Sudan.

Naguib spent his formative years in Sudan, where, as a child, ostriches and monkeys were his playmates, in a house decorated with hunting trophies like elephant tusks, tiger-skin rugs and rhinoceros and gazelle heads on the wall. Naguib's favourite game, however, was playing at soldiers with his younger brother, Ali. Having built a toy fortress in the front yard, Naguib would spend hours conquering inches of land with his toy soldiers.

Nevertheless, Naguib's father did not want his sons to follow in his footsteps, believing from his own experience as an officer in the Egyptian army that the army at that time was little more than a group of auxiliaries waiting for British orders. He believed that Naguib could serve Egypt better in civilian life, and he even had Ibrahim Urabi, son of the 1882 revolutionary Ahmed Urabi, speak to Naguib and caution him that by joining the military he would become only "a supervisor in the service of the British."

As a result, Naguib first studied to become a translator, and later in his life earned a law degree, an MA in political science and another MA in civil law. He never completed his doctorate because his career in the army, undertaken in defiance of his father's wishes, by then had begun to take off. Nevertheless, he found the time to polish his language skills, learning English, French, Italian and German. Naguib also began to study the Hebrew language in the 1950s, and soon after the Revolution he ordered that Hebrew be taught at military college and at Cairo and Alexandria universities, realising that the Egyptian army had been handicapped during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War by the fact that very few soldiers could interpret Israeli communications.

While studying in Khartoum, Naguib had often been censured and sometimes even whipped by his British tutors for criticizing Britain's occupation of Egypt and Sudan. At this time, Naguib chose Napoleon as a role model, even deciding to sleep on the floor instead of on a bed to imitate the great French general. Soon, however, Napoleon was replaced in Naguib's affections by Mustafa Kamil, the founder of the National Party, and later he found another mirror in Saad Zaghlul. Some years after he was ousted from power, Naguib also came to somewhat admire Gandhi

After the death of his father in 1916, the family moved to Cairo, while Naguib and Ali finished their studies in Sudan.