Fawaz Gerges

World-leading authority on the Middle East Professor Fawaz Gerges explains how the Middle East has been shaped by the conflict between political Islamists and secular-leaning nationalists.

Gerges says the Egyptian military’s overthrow in 2013 of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, echoed an older rift in Egypt and the Middle East – the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Nasser. Gerges says this split between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region since the 1920s. And he explores the divide through the lives of Nasser and another influential figure, Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the father of many branches of radical political Islam.

Gerges is a Lebanese-American academic and professor of Middle East politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World and Obama and the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment?