1918 -
Egyptian military officer and politician.
Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din (or Mohieddin) came from a wealthy landowning family outside Mansura, Egypt. He was educated at the Military College and the Staff Officers College in Cairo, served in the Palestine War, and was an Army Staff College lecturer at the time of the revolution. An original member of the Free Officers and a key figure in the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952, he was appointed to the Revolutionary Command Council established to support Gamal Abdel Nasser in government. Muhyi al-Din subsequently served as interior minister (1953 - 1962), founded the General Intelligence Service, and then served as prime minister (1965 - 1966) and vice president (1967). After the 1967 war with Israel, Nasser resigned and named Muhyi al-Din his successor, a fact widely interpreted as acquiescence to U.S. influence, particularly since Muhyi al-Din supported economic liberalization throughout the 1960s. Public demonstrations encouraged Nasser to withdraw his decision, and Muhyi al-Din left public life in March 1968.
After Nasser's death in 1970, it was thought that conservatives were plotting to ensure that Muhyi alDin succeeded as president, leading to a wave of "corrective" trials when Anwar al-Sadat secured the support of centrist and leftist camps. In 1972 Muhyi al-Din was again linked to a petition to Sadat by ministers and ex-officers opposed to Soviet influence, and in 1978 he publicly opposed Sadat's rapprochement with the United States and Israel. He has since refrained from making public interventions.
Bibliography
Beattie, Kirk. Egypt during the Sadat Years. New York: Pal-grave, 2000.
Mohi el Din, Khaled. Memories of a Revolution: Egypt, 1952. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 1995.
Waterbury, John. The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The PoliticalEconomy of Two Regimes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
— DAVID WALDNER
UPDATED BY GEORGE R. WILKES
