History of the Republic of Egypt
On 22–26 July 1952, the Free Officers, a group of disaffected officers in the Egyptian army founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and headed by General Muhammad Naguib, initiated the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 with the overthrowing King Farouk, whom the military blamed for Egypt's poor performance in the 1948 war with Israel and lack of progress in fighting poverty, disease, and illiteracy in Egypt. In the following two years, the Free Officers consolidated power, and, following a brief experiment with civilian rule, abrogated the 1953 constitution, and declared Egypt a republic on 18 June 1953, Muhammad Naguib as Egypt's first President.
Muslim Brotherhood
In 1952 Egypt's monarchy was overthrown by a group of nationalist military officers (Free Officers Movement) who had formed a cell within the Brotherhood during the first war against Israel in 1948. However, after the revolution Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the 'free officers' cell, after deposing the first President of Egypt, Muhammad Neguib, in a coup, quickly moved against the Brotherhood, blaming them for an attempt on his life. The Brotherhood was again banned and this time thousands of its members were imprisoned, many being tortured and held for years in prisons and concentration camps. In the 1950s and 1960s many Brotherhood members sought sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. From the 1950s, Al-Banna's son-in-law Said Ramadan emerged as a major leader of the Brotherhood and the movement's unofficial "foreign minister". Ramadan built a major center for the Brotherhood centered on a mosque in Munich, which became "a refuge for the beleaguered group during its decades in the wilderness".