After performing the Egyptian coup d’état of 2013, Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi became the beneficiary of a personality cult that baffled many. Notwithstanding the rapid deterioration of civil liberties, a significant level of popular enthusiasm about the new military strongman was undeniably there. How could popular support for an authoritarian leader reach such heights in a country that had so recently experienced a grass roots revolutionary uprising that celebrated the power of the people? There are multiple reasons that can help to explain this, but in this paper I will argue that a certain kind of authoritarianism in the Egyptian collective memory was tapped into at a crucial juncture of Egyptian politics. I will focus on the way in which Gamal Abdel Nasser was revived as a national icon during that period that became known as ‘Sissi-Mania’. In order to understand how Nasser could function as a model for a new ruler whose neo-liberal politics is far removed from Nasserist ideology, I will first reflect on how Nasser entered Egyptian ‘collective memory’ (Employing Jan Assmann, Jeffrey Olick, but especially Shar?f Y?nus, Al-zahf al-muqaddas, 2012). Consequently, I will trace how the horizontal nature of the protest movement and the political incompetence of the Muslim Brotherhood created a yearning for ‘law and order’ as well as a broad antipathy against the MB. In that context, Nasser was catapulted from collective memory into contemporary opposition discourse, as the arch nemesis of the MB and a symbol of national strength. Apart from explaining how we should understand the revival of Nasser in the public sphere in post-Mubarak Egypt, this paper will also critically address the extent to which the – rather Eurocentric - field of memory studies could be fruitfully employed in Middle Eastern studies.