Mick Hartley

It's a question posed by Hazem Saghieh in this piece on an Arab world consumed by conpiracy theories, prompted by a spat between the daughters of Nasser and Anwar Sadat after the former described the latter as "the killer of my father":

[W]hat is on display here is only an exaggerated form of the conspiracy theories that are reaching unprecedented levels in Egypt and the Arab world. The leading Palestinian politician Farouk Qaddumi has accused the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas of killing Abbas's own predecessor Yasser Arafat. It is surely time to ask: can the "natural" death of any Arab leader be taken as a fact? Is it possible for an Arab leader to die without being murdered?

The shared feature of the "murder victims", Nasser and Arafat is that these very different political figures represent a way of thinking and behaving that is now dead. Since admitting its death is hard, a resort to conspiracy theories becomes for those who seek to "keep them alive" an urgent duty and necessary outlet.

The alternative, after all, is hard. It would require the parties involved to discard conspiracies and summon the courage to face the death of the political current that prevailed between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, known as the Arab national-liberation movement.