Anwar Sadat

Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat was born on December 25, 1918, in Mit Abu al-Kum, a small farming village in the Monufia governorate of the Nile Delta, then part of the British-dominated Sultanate of Egypt ^[1]. He was one of thirteen children in a household of modest means. His father, Anwar Mohammed el-Sadat, worked as a clerk in a military hospital, and his mother, Sit al-Berain, was of Sudanese descent, a heritage that later exposed Sadat to insults from political rivals but which he carried with open pride ^[2].

The village shaped him more than any school. In his memoir, In Search of Identity, Sadat wrote at length about the rhythms of rural Egypt, the canal, the fields, and the stories told by his grandmother, who raised him during his earliest years while his father worked in Sudan ^[2]. He absorbed tales of Egyptian resistance figures, including Zahran, a peasant hanged by the British after the Denshawai incident of 1906, whose story stayed with him for life.

The family moved to Cairo around 1925, where Sadat completed his schooling under strained financial circumstances. A turning point came in 1936, when the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty opened the Royal Military Academy to young men outside the traditional landowning elite. Sadat gained admission in 1937 and graduated as a second lieutenant in 1938, posted to Manqabad in Upper Egypt, where he met a fellow junior officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser ^[1][3].

Sadat's early military career was defined less by soldiering than by conspiracy against British influence in Egypt. During the Second World War he made contact with German agents, hoping Axis pressure might force the British out. The scheme collapsed, and in 1942 he was arrested, stripped of his commission, and imprisoned ^[1][3]. He escaped in 1944, lived under assumed names, and worked odd jobs before being jailed again from 1946 to 1948 in connection with the assassination of the pro-British politician Amin Osman, a charge on which he was ultimately acquitted ^[2].

Reinstated in the army in 1950, Sadat joined the Free Officers, the clandestine group of nationalist officers organized around Nasser. When the movement overthrew King Farouk on July 23, 1952, it was Sadat who read the first proclamation of the revolution over Egyptian radio ^[3]. In the new order he held a string of posts: editor of the regime's newspaper al-Gumhuriya, minister of state, secretary-general of the National Union, and Speaker of the National Assembly from 1960 to 1968 ^[1].

Contemporaries often underestimated him. Within Nasser's circle Sadat acquired a reputation as a loyal, unthreatening functionary, and some Cairo wits mocked him as Nasser's yes-man. That perception probably helped him. In December 1969 Nasser appointed him vice president, and when Nasser died suddenly of a heart attack on September 28, 1970, Sadat succeeded to the presidency, confirmed by a national referendum in October ^[1][4]. Rivals who assumed he would be a transitional caretaker were removed in May 1971, when Sadat purged senior Nasserists in what he called the Corrective Revolution ^[4].

Egypt in 1970 was a wounded country. The 1967 war with Israel had cost it the Sinai Peninsula, and the stalemate that followed drained the economy and national morale. Sadat concluded that only a military shock could break the deadlock and force serious negotiation. On October 6, 1973, during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur and the Muslim month of Ramadan, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in a carefully planned assault, breaching the Israeli Bar Lev Line, while Syria attacked on the Golan Heights ^[1][5].

The war's later phases went badly for Egypt, with Israeli forces counterattacking across the canal, but the opening success transformed Sadat's standing. Egyptians hailed him as the Hero of the Crossing, and the fighting triggered superpower diplomacy that Sadat had sought all along ^[5]. Disengagement agreements brokered by the American secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1974 and 1975 returned parts of Sinai to Egyptian control and marked Sadat's decisive shift away from the Soviet Union, whose military advisers he had already expelled in 1972, and toward Washington ^[1][4].

Then came the gesture that defined him. On November 19, 1977, after declaring to Egypt's parliament that he would go to the ends of the earth for peace, Sadat flew to Israel and addressed the Knesset in Jerusalem, the first Arab head of state to visit the country ^[5]. The trip electrified world opinion and horrified many Arab governments. It opened the road to the Camp David Accords, negotiated in September 1978 under the mediation of the American president Jimmy Carter, and to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed in Washington on March 26, 1979 ^[4][5]. Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for the accords ^[6].

At home, Sadat set about dismantling parts of Nasser's system. His policy of infitah, or economic opening, announced in 1974, invited foreign investment and loosened state control of the economy ^[1][4]. The results were mixed. New wealth appeared in Cairo, but so did visible inequality, and when the government cut bread and fuel subsidies in January 1977 under pressure from international lenders, riots swept Egyptian cities and were suppressed by the army ^[4].

Politically, Sadat allowed a cautious pluralism, permitting platforms within the ruling party to become separate parties and founding the National Democratic Party in 1978. He also released many Muslim Brotherhood members imprisoned under Nasser, calculating that Islamist groups would counterbalance the left ^[4]. The bet turned dangerous. Radical offshoots rejected his peace with Israel outright, and religious opposition hardened through the late 1970s.

The peace treaty isolated Egypt abroad. The Arab League suspended Egyptian membership in 1979 and moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, and most Arab states broke diplomatic relations ^[1][5]. Facing rising dissent, Sadat answered with repression. In September 1981 he ordered the arrest of more than 1,500 critics, a sweep that took in Islamists, Copts, journalists, and secular politicians alike, a move that damaged his reputation at home and abroad in the final weeks of his life ^[4][7].

Sadat married twice. His first marriage, to Ehsan Madi, arranged in his village milieu, ended in divorce and produced three daughters. In 1949 he married Jehan Raouf, a young woman of Egyptian and British parentage whom he met while still a fugitive from political charges. The couple had three daughters and a son ^[2][8]. Jehan Sadat became one of the most publicly active first ladies in the Arab world, campaigning for women's legal rights, championing amendments to Egypt's personal status laws, and later teaching and lecturing internationally ^[8].

In manner, Sadat cultivated the image of a devout village son made good. He kept a house in Mit Abu al-Kum, prayed publicly, and bore the darkened prayer mark on his forehead known in Egypt as a zebiba. He was fond of Western dress, pipes, and cinema, and he had once, during his years out of the army, tried his hand at acting ^[2]. His 1978 autobiography, In Search of Identity, presented his life as a series of trials, from prison cells to the presidency, and remains a primary source for any Anwar Sadat biography, though historians read its self-portrait with care ^[2].

On October 6, 1981, Sadat presided over the annual military parade in Nasr City, Cairo, commemorating the canal crossing of 1973, the anniversary he prized above all others. As aircraft passed overhead, a group of soldiers led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli leapt from a truck in the parade column, threw grenades, and raked the reviewing stand with automatic fire ^[7]. Sadat was hit repeatedly and died that afternoon. Eleven others were killed and dozens wounded, among them foreign diplomats and Egyptian officials ^[7].

The attackers belonged to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group enraged by the peace with Israel and by the September arrests. Islambouli and four others were convicted and executed in 1982 ^[7]. Vice President Hosni Mubarak, wounded slightly in the attack, succeeded Sadat and would rule Egypt for nearly thirty years. Sadat's funeral drew three former American presidents and Menachem Begin, but few Arab leaders attended, a measure of his isolation in the region he had once helped lead ^[5][7]. He was buried at the Unknown Soldier Memorial in Cairo, across from the stand where he was shot.

Sadat's legacy divides opinion more than four decades after his death. Among the most cited Anwar Sadat achievements are the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal, the recovery of Sinai (completed under the treaty in 1982, after his death), the realignment of Egypt from Soviet client to American partner, and the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, an agreement that has held ever since ^[1][5]. His Nobel Peace Prize made him, with Begin, the first laureates from the Middle East conflict ^[6].

Critics weigh those Anwar Sadat facts against the costs: an economic opening that widened inequality, the encouragement of Islamist currents that eventually consumed him, the suppression of dissent in his final years, and a separate peace that, in the view of many Arabs, abandoned the Palestinians ^[4][7]. In Egypt his memory has been rehabilitated in waves, honored on currency, in a Cairo metro station bearing his name, and in television dramas about his life.

Historians tend to agree on one point: Sadat possessed an unusual willingness to gamble. The same instinct that sent his army across the canal in 1973 carried him to Jerusalem in 1977. Whether judged a visionary or a ruler who outran his own society, he remains the figure through whom modern Egypt's hardest choices about war and peace were made ^[3][5].