ABSTRACT
The themes of the speeches are country-centered: Egypt's role in history, its achievement in becoming a non-aligned nation, and its freedom from any external colonizing influence. The immediate contextual factors of these speeches are different from the Iraqi ones, for instance, which consist of a press-conference with a question/answer type of discourse (see Chapter four). Here, Nasser addresses a very large crowd of Egyptians (the Iraqi audience consists of Arab and foreign journalists) who occasionally interrupt and participate in the speech by cheering, chanting and clapping. This feedback is important to the speaker and allows him to measure the impact of the speech. The Iraqi, Libyan and Egyptian speeches, as examples of political discourse, all aim to convince an audience, and thus constitute a persuasive discourse as opposed to an ordinary conversation.2 Moreover, Nasser's speeches here should be seen in the context of the aim of his speeches in general, which are quite didactic in nature, his ambition being to convert the Egyptians to his view and many of his speeches took the form of lectures on his conception of Arab nationalism in the tradition of Egyptian paternalism.3
