On the morning of 6 October 1981, Anwar Sadat sat in a reviewing stand in Cairo, watching his army parade past in celebration of the war he had launched eight years earlier, and within minutes he was dead. Bullets fired by soldiers in his own armed forces cut him down before the horrified eyes of foreign dignitaries and television cameras, and Egypt lost the most consequential president it had known since the monarchy fell. The man who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 for making peace with Israel was gunned down by men who saw him as a traitor to the Arab cause, a sequence of events that still startles anyone who first meets it cold. Sadat traded war for peace and the Sinai for recognition, a gamble that made him a global statesman and a target at home; the same act won him the Nobel and cost him his life. How a village boy climbed from the barracks to the presidency, how he outlasted the giants around him, and why the peace he made proved fatal to him, is the story this article tells in full.

The boy was born on 25 December 1918 in Mit Abu al-Kum, a village in Monufia province in the Nile Delta, one of thirteen children in a family that was neither rich nor connected. His father worked as a clerk in a military hospital, a modest civil service position that kept food on the table without granting the family any standing among the landowners and notables who ran rural Egypt. The household was crowded, devout in the rhythms of village Islam, and shaped by the nationalist anger that swept the Delta in the years after the First World War, when Egypt’s nominal independence under a British-dominated monarchy fooled almost no one. Young Anwar absorbed that anger early. He grew up hearing that his country was not really its own, and like many boys of his generation he came to see the army as the one institution where an Egyptian could serve something larger than a landlord’s estate. Village life also gave him something subtler, a feel for ordinary Egyptians that the cosmopolitan officers from Cairo’s better families often lacked. He knew the Delta’s fellahin, its markets, its mosques, and its grievances from the inside, and the plainspoken, folksy manner he would later use as president was not an invention but a return to the voice of Mit Abu al-Kum. The thirteen children of the household scattered into the usual fates of the Egyptian lower middle class, clerks, teachers, soldiers, but Anwar carried from the start a sense that his life was owed a larger stage.

From those crowded beginnings he found the one ladder available to bright lower middle class boys of his generation, the Royal Military Academy, and he graduated in 1938 as a signals officer. The academy trained him in communications and staff work rather than battlefield command, a specialty that would keep him out of the limelight for years. Army life gave him a uniform, a salary, and something more useful, a circle of fellow officers who shared his contempt for the British occupation and for a monarchy that seemed to exist to serve London’s interests. The postings were unglamorous, desert garrisons in the south where bored young officers read, argued, and plotted. Among the officers posted alongside him in those southern outposts was Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the two men, together with a small conspiratorial circle, began talking about a free Egypt with the intensity of young men who have nothing to lose but patience. The friendship mattered. Nasser was the magnetic organizer, the one who could turn grievance into a plan, and Sadat attached himself to that orbit early, as a loyalist and a believer rather than as a rival.

That loyalty had consequences. During the Second World War, when German armies threatened Egypt from the west and the British ruled the country under martial law, Sadat’s contacts with Axis agents as a possible lever against the British came to the attention of the authorities. Whatever his intentions, and biographers disagree about how serious or naive they were, the British treated him as a security risk. He was arrested in 1942 and kept in prison until 1944, two lost years that hardened his sense of himself as a nationalist who had paid for his convictions. Prison also taught him patience, a quality that would serve him better than brilliance. Worse followed after the war. In 1946 he was expelled from the army over his links to the assassination of a politician seen as a British collaborator, and for four years he lived as a civilian in disgrace, taking menial jobs to support his family, including a stint hauling furniture. His comrades in uniform advanced while he carried other people’s belongings through Cairo’s streets. He was reinstated in 1950, a quiet rehabilitation that restored his rank but not his standing, and he returned to the barracks as a man his superiors regarded as a troublemaker with a record. According to his memoirs, he never doubted that he was bound for something larger, but at the time nothing about his record suggested a future president. He was, in the eyes of the establishment, a used-up conspirator lucky to wear the uniform again. Yet those wilderness years gave him an education no academy could offer. He learned what it meant to be powerless in a police state, to be watched, dismissed, and forgotten, and the lesson stayed with him when the tables turned. Men who had once signed the orders against him would one day sit across from him as subordinates, and he would remember exactly how the machinery of disgrace worked.

Sadat and the Revolution That Made Him

The Free Officers who had been plotting in the mess halls moved in the summer of 1952, and the monarchy of King Farouk collapsed faster than anyone expected. In the early hours of 23 July the army seized the strategic points of Cairo, and the king, abandoned by his courtiers and his British protectors, abdicated within days. It fell to the young signals officer with the radio voice to tell the nation what had happened, and Sadat read the revolution’s first communique over Radio Cairo, announcing that the army had taken power to cleanse a corrupt regime. The moment made him visible in a way his career never had. Millions of Egyptians heard his voice before they knew his face, and in the weeks that followed he became one of the recognized figures of the 1952 Revolution and the Free Officers, even though he had played no part in the actual planning of the coup. Nasser, the real architect, kept him close but never quite central. Through the 1950s and 1960s the Egyptian leader collected ministries for his loyal friend to run and positions for him to hold, including service as a government minister and later as speaker of the National Assembly, roles that placed him at the top of the state without ever putting him at the center of power. He chaired sessions, cut ribbons, represented Egypt at funerals and conferences, and smiled in the official photographs. At one point he edited the regime’s newspaper, Al Gomhouria, a post that taught him how the press could be managed as an instrument of power. He was at Nasser’s side through the triumph of the Suez nationalization and the catastrophe of the 1967 defeat, watching how the leader absorbed adulation in one decade and near ruin in the next. Biographers disagree about how much this arrangement rankled, though his memoirs present him as content to wait and serve, a man who understood that proximity to power was itself a kind of power.

There were reasons to doubt the official story even then. Sadat had survived prison, expulsion, and disgrace, and men who survive that much rarely lack ambition. But he played the long game with unusual discipline. While other Free Officers quarreled with Nasser and were purged or sidelined, the former furniture hauler stayed loyal, stayed useful, and stayed alive politically. He learned the machinery of the state from the inside, watching how Nasser balanced the army, the party, and the security services against one another. He was, as one account puts it, Nasser’s most faithful student, and the lessons he absorbed about concentrating power and striking first would return with interest two decades later.

In the Shadow of Nasser

To understand Sadat’s rise, it helps to see how thoroughly he was underestimated. For nearly two decades he was the man who stood beside Gamal Abdel Nasser in photographs, the faithful lieutenant who never led a faction, never commanded troops in battle, never built an independent base. His reputation in Cairo’s political circles was that of a courtier rather than a contender, a man whose smile concealed, in the view of the ambitious, very little. When Nasser appointed him vice president in December 1969, the Cairo rumor mill reportedly treated it as a placeholder move, a way to fill the office with someone harmless while the real struggle for the succession played out among heavier figures. Rivals at the top of the Arab Socialist Union reportedly dismissed him as a mere transitional figure, a caretaker who would keep the chair warm until the real contenders sorted themselves out. The description, attributed to the whispers of the Cairo elite rather than stated as settled fact, fit the record as it stood: he had no power base in the military, no following in the party, no reputation as a thinker or a fighter, and a manner that stronger men mistook for weakness.

Then Nasser died. On 28 September 1970 the president, exhausted by the strain of the war of attrition with Israel and the shock of Black September in Jordan, where his efforts to mediate between King Hussein and the Palestinian fedayeen had drained his last reserves, collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of 52. The news stunned the Arab world. Nasser had been the towering figure of Arab nationalism, and his funeral drew millions of weeping Egyptians into the streets of Cairo. Behind the grief, the regime’s inner circle moved with cold speed. The constitution provided for the vice president to assume the office, and the power brokers calculated that Sadat could be managed. On 15 October 1970 he was formally confirmed as president of Egypt, first by the assembly and then by a plebiscite that returned the customary overwhelming majority. It was, in the judgment of the men who had dismissed him, a temporary arrangement, and they behaved accordingly. The new president played along at first, declaring 1971 the year of decision and promising movement on the Israeli occupation of Sinai, promises the power centers assumed he lacked the strength to keep. Foreign observers shared the skepticism. Diplomats in Cairo filed reports describing a weak figurehead, and the Israelis saw no reason to take his warnings seriously. Everyone, it seemed, agreed on who Anwar Sadat was, and everyone was wrong.

The men who expected to govern through him were not lightweights. Ali Sabri, the vice president and secretary general of the Arab Socialist Union, commanded the party apparatus and had the ear of Moscow. Sharawy Gomaa held the Interior Ministry, with its files, its informers, and its police. Sami Sharaf, the minister for presidential affairs who had been Nasser’s gatekeeper for years, controlled the flow of paper and people to the presidency itself. Together with their allies in the media and the bureaucracy, they formed what Egyptians called the power centers, a network of officials who had governed through Nasser’s last years and who expected the new president to consult them, defer to them, and eventually step aside for one of them. They treated him with the condescension of men who believe the fix is in, and for a few months he gave them no reason to think otherwise. He attended their meetings, listened to their advice, and said little. According to his memoirs, he was studying them the way he had once studied Nasser, learning where the levers were and who held them.

The Corrective Revolution of May 1971

What followed in the spring of 1971 was a confrontation as decisive as anything in Sadat’s career, and it deserves to be told in full because it explains everything that came after. The power centers had begun to act as a government within the government. According to accounts from the period, Sabri and his allies sought to bind the president’s hands, limiting his freedom in foreign policy, resisting his feelers toward the Americans, and pressing him to accept a collective leadership in which he would be first among equals at best. The dispute sharpened over the question of the Soviet Union’s role in Egypt and over Sadat’s talk of a political settlement with Israel, positions the old guard viewed as betrayals of Nasser’s legacy. Tensions built through April, with rumors of a move against Sadat circulating in Cairo’s political salons and in the foreign press. Some accounts hold that Sabri’s circle was preparing to force the president’s resignation or to have the party’s central committee strip him of authority. Whether the threat was imminent or exaggerated, the president decided to act first.

He responded with a counterstroke of remarkable precision. Between 13 and 15 May 1971, he dismissed Vice President Ali Sabri from all his posts, removed Interior Minister Sharawy Gomaa, and had Sami Sharaf arrested along with a circle of senior officials that included the ministers of information and war. The security services, whose loyalty he had quietly cultivated, moved against the plotters before they could move against him. He called the purge the Corrective Revolution, presenting it as a restoration of lawful institutions and of the revolution’s true principles rather than as a coup within the regime, and he filled the emptied offices with men loyal to him personally. The language mattered. By framing the purge as a correction, he claimed Nasser’s mantle for himself and denied his enemies the status of revolutionaries.

The operation succeeded almost bloodlessly, and its success revealed something about the new president that his rivals had missed. The supposed transitional figure had read his opponents, timed his move, and struck without hesitation. With Sabri, Gomaa, and Sharaf gone, the power centers were smashed, and Sadat stood alone at the summit of the Egyptian state, answerable to no faction and constrained by no collective leadership. The army, which might have intervened, stayed in its barracks, its commanders either loyal to the president or unwilling to gamble on the losers. The public, which had never been consulted, accepted the outcome as another reshuffling at the top, and the trials that followed, broadcast and reported in the press, cemented the narrative of a president who had saved the revolution from a conspiracy. For the first time in his political life, he held real power in his own hands, not borrowed from Nasser or shared with a committee. The affable caretaker was gone, if he had ever existed. In the purge’s wake he rebuilt the government around men whose loyalty ran to him rather than to the old apparatus, and he moved to settle accounts with the Soviet advisers whose presence had been one of the old guard’s articles of faith. Cairo’s rumor mill, which had once dismissed him, now spoke of him with a new caution. The president who had been counted as nobody’s man had shown himself to be his own man entirely, and the region’s chancelleries began revising their files.

The question that hung over Cairo in the summer of 1971 was what he intended to do with it. He had promised action on the occupied Sinai, and the Israelis, the Americans, and the Soviets were all watching to see whether the new master of Egypt was a man of words or a man of deeds. His answer would arrive in stages, and it would reorder the Middle East. With his rivals removed, Sadat was free to launch his own gamble on war and peace, a gamble that would begin with a surprise attack across the Suez Canal and end, against every expectation, with an Egyptian president welcomed in Jerusalem and a peace treaty signed in Washington. The war came first, and it came sooner than anyone believed possible.

The Break with Moscow

By the summer of 1972, Anwar Sadat had decided that the Soviet connection he inherited from Gamal Abdel Nasser was worth less than it cost. On 18 July 1972, the president announced that the Soviet military advisers stationed in Egypt, a force usually estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 men, would have to leave. The order was blunt and the deadline short, and the advisers were gone within weeks. Few events in Sadat’s presidency startled the world as thoroughly as this one. Egypt had depended on Soviet arms, spare parts, and expertise since the mid 1950s. Nasser had built the entire edifice of Egyptian defense policy on the Soviet relationship, and his successor appeared to be tearing the foundation out from under it. The surprise was deliberate, but the motives behind it have been debated ever since.

Sadat’s own stated reason was that Moscow had become a constraint rather than a support. He charged that the Soviet Union rationed the weapons it supplied, holding back the offensive aircraft and equipment Egypt needed to contemplate action across the Suez Canal while keeping the advisers in place to restrain Egyptian decision making. In the president’s account, the advisers were not only trainers and technicians; they were a Soviet hand on the Egyptian steering wheel, and he would not launch any policy, military or diplomatic, while another power’s officers sat inside his command structure. This explanation fit Sadat’s broader claim that he was restoring Egyptian sovereignty and national dignity, themes he returned to throughout his presidency.

Some historians argue that the expulsion served a second purpose entirely, and that it was aimed less at Moscow than at Washington. In this reading, Sadat was sending a deliberate signal to the United States: Egypt could be separated from the Soviet camp, and the price of a full separation was American engagement with the Arab-Israeli dispute. The argument holds that Sadat understood that only Washington could pressure Israel toward withdrawal from Sinai, and that by casting off the Soviet presence he was making himself legible to the Americans as a potential partner. Neither motive excludes the other, and the historical record supports both to some degree. What can be said with confidence is that the expulsion removed a layer of Soviet control over Egyptian military planning, humiliated Moscow, and forced the United States to notice a man it had previously treated as Nasser’s undistinguished heir.

The break also fit Sadat’s domestic purposes. The Soviet presence had been unpopular with segments of the Egyptian officer corps and intelligentsia, and the expulsion burnished the president’s image as a leader who answered to no foreign master. For a president who had taken power with few of Nasser’s charismatic advantages, that symbolism mattered. Whether it was strategy, dignity, or both, the effect was the same. Within days of the announcement, Egypt’s military planning was an Egyptian affair again, and the road toward an Egyptian decision about war was clear of one more obstacle.

What followed was not, however, a clean divorce. Moscow reacted with wounded fury, denouncing the ingratitude of a client it had armed for nearly two decades, yet the flow of Soviet weapons to Egypt never fully stopped. Spare parts, ammunition, and new systems continued to arrive through commercial and military channels, and the war Sadat launched the following year would be fought overwhelmingly with Soviet-built equipment. The expulsion removed the men, not the arsenal. Some historians read this as evidence that Sadat never intended a rupture with Moscow at all, only the removal of its supervision, while others hold that he was keeping his options open until the American channel proved real. What is beyond dispute is that the advisers’ departure changed the balance of influence: Egypt remained a customer of Soviet arms, but it was no longer a ward of Soviet policy.

The Road to the October War

Once the advisers were gone, Sadat faced the central problem of his presidency in its starkest form. Sinai remained under Israeli occupation, the Suez Canal stood closed and largely silted, and the diplomacy of the previous five years had produced nothing. The American-backed Rogers Plan of 1970 had collapsed, the United Nations framework had stalled, and Israel showed no interest in negotiating from a position of unchallenged strength. Sadat inherited what journalists of the period called the state of “no war, no peace,” a phrase that captured both the absence of fighting and the absence of any movement toward settlement. The president warned repeatedly, in speeches and interviews through 1972 and 1973, that Egypt would not accept the status quo indefinitely. Western diplomats largely discounted the warnings. Sadat was underestimated with a consistency that would come to look like a pattern in his career.

Part of the discounting came from Sadat’s own record of unfulfilled threats. He had declared 1971 the “year of decision,” then let it pass without action, and his repeated ultimatums had trained foreign observers to hear bluster where they should have heard resolve. The Egyptian leader understood the cost of this credibility problem and seems to have accepted it as the price of surprise. He could not advertise his intentions without inviting preemptive pressure from both superpowers to stand down, so he let the world believe he was incapable of acting. The misjudgment was mutual in one sense: even as he prepared for war, Sadat kept the diplomatic door visibly open, meeting with American envoys and receiving proposals, so that no one could later say Egypt had not exhausted the alternatives. By the autumn of 1973, he had assembled the one thing the stalemate had denied him, a justification for action that no one could dismiss as mere impatience.

The decision to go to war grew directly out of this deadlock. Sadat did not seek a war of liberation in the grand sense; Egypt could not realistically drive Israel out of Sinai by force alone. He sought a limited war, a shock large enough to shatter the complacency of all sides and restart the diplomatic process. The 1973 October War began on 6 October 1973, and its details belong to another account, but its political meaning belongs here. The Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal, executed with discipline and courage, did what no speech or proposal had done: it restored Egyptian and Arab pride after the humiliation of 1967 and it gave Sadat the leverage he had been missing at every negotiating table. Israel’s image of invincibility was punctured, the superpowers were jolted into active mediation, and the diplomatic deadlock that had frozen the region for six years was broken in a matter of weeks.

The war must be kept at this distance in the present account, because its military course is the subject of a separate article in this series. What matters here is the political arithmetic Sadat extracted from it. He had wagered that a short, sharp conflict would convert military effort into diplomatic capital, and the wager paid. The ceasefire left Egypt holding a bridgehead in Sinai and, more importantly, holding the attention of Washington. Sadat had bet that the United States would intervene to prevent an Israeli collapse and would then stay involved to secure a settlement. He read the Americans correctly.

From Moscow to Washington

The war’s aftermath handed American diplomacy the opening Sadat had been cultivating since the expulsion of the Soviet advisers. Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, embarked on the intensive shuttle diplomacy that became the signature of this period, flying between Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus to broker step-by-step agreements. The method suited Sadat’s purposes perfectly. Kissinger’s incremental approach offered Egypt concrete, visible gains without demanding a comprehensive settlement that the Arab world was not ready to accept, and it placed Washington at the center of the process in a way that sidelined both the Soviet Union and the more radical Arab states.

The first fruit of the shuttle was the Sinai disengagement agreement of January 1974, which established a separation of forces along the Suez Canal and returned a strip of Sinai’s eastern bank to Egyptian control, monitored by a United Nations buffer force. A second agreement followed in September 1975, extending the disengagement and returning further territory, including the strategic Gidi and Mitla passes and the Abu Rudeis oil fields. Each agreement was modest beside the scale of the occupation, yet each moved Egyptian troops forward and Israeli troops back, and each was achieved through the American channel. The pattern was unmistakable: Cairo dealt with Washington, and Washington delivered.

The realignment acquired its public theater in June 1974, when Richard Nixon became the first American president to visit Egypt. The crowds that greeted him in Cairo were enormous, and Sadat played the occasion for everything it was worth, presenting the visit as proof that Egypt had rejoined the world of great-power diplomacy on its own terms. Substantive agreements on economic aid and nuclear cooperation for peaceful purposes accompanied the pageantry. The visit did not erase the memory of two decades of Soviet partnership, but it certified the new reality: the road to Sinai’s recovery ran through Washington, and Sadat intended to travel it in the open.

The September 1975 agreement, known as Sinai II, also revealed the costs of the American embrace. Its terms placed American civilian technicians in the Sinai passes as part of the monitoring arrangements, a provision that critics in Egypt and the wider Arab world denounced as a foreign presence replacing the Soviet one. Syria broke off its coordination with Cairo over the deal, and the more militant Arab states accused Sadat of signing a separate peace in stages. The president dismissed the criticism as the complaint of those who preferred slogans to territory, but the quarrel foreshadowed a pattern that would define the rest of his diplomacy: every step toward Washington bought concrete gains for Egypt and paid for them in Arab solidarity.

The political logic of this realignment reached its formal conclusion in March 1976, when Sadat abrogated the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation that Egypt had signed with the Soviet Union in 1971. The treaty had been Nasser’s successor’s own handiwork, signed in the early months of his presidency when the Soviet tie still seemed indispensable. Abrogating it five years later was a public declaration that the Soviet era in Egyptian policy was over. Moscow protested and demanded the repayment of arms debts, but the strategic fact was settled. Egypt’s security now depended on the American relationship, and the Soviet Union, which had invested two decades in Egypt, had been maneuvered out of its most important Arab position.

The domestic companion to this foreign policy turn was the October Paper of 1974, which Sadat presented to the People’s Assembly as a new charter for Egyptian development. The paper argued that the era of state socialism and war economies had to give way to reconstruction, foreign investment, and what would become the open door economic policy, the infitah. It marked the moment when the president’s reorientation stopped being a series of improvisations and became an announced doctrine: Egypt would look west for its development capital as it was already looking west for its diplomacy. The October Paper did not end debate inside Egypt about the direction of the country; if anything, it opened new disputes about inequality and dependence that would shadow Sadat for the rest of his rule. But as a turning point it was unmistakable. The Soviet advisers were gone, the friendship treaty was on its way to the shredder, the American secretary of state was a regular visitor to Cairo, and the president had told his own parliament that the future lay in a new direction.

The Logic of War for Peace

Sadat’s calculation behind the 1973 war deserves to be stated plainly, because it was as cold as it was bold. He believed that no amount of pleading would move Israel or awaken the great powers, and that only a war, limited in its aims but real in its costs, could break the psychological and diplomatic stalemate. The phrase often attached to this reasoning, that Sadat fought a war to make peace, captures the paradox at the heart of his strategy. He did not expect to recover Sinai by force of arms. He expected to create a crisis that Washington could not ignore and that would end with Washington pressing Israel toward the negotiating table. The crossing of the canal was, in this reading, a means to an end that was always diplomatic. Every element of the campaign, the careful limitation of objectives, the readiness to accept a ceasefire once the point had been made, the immediate pivot to Kissinger’s mediation, supports this interpretation of his intentions.

The defense of this strategy rests on its results. The war produced the disengagement agreements, the American engagement, and eventually the path to a settlement that recovered every inch of Sinai. Without the shock of October 1973, the argument runs, the stalemate of “no war, no peace” might have hardened into permanence, and Egypt might have remained frozen in a posture of humiliation indefinitely. Sadat’s defenders hold that he took the only instrument available to a weak party facing a stronger one and a complacent world, and that he used it with a precision that kept the war limited and the diplomacy productive. In this view, the war was an act of statesmanship disguised as a military gamble, and its success vindicates the risk.

The criticism is equally direct and rests on the human cost. Thousands of Egyptians died in the fighting, and thousands more were wounded, and the critics of the strategy ask whether those lives purchased anything that patient diplomacy could not have achieved. This reading holds that Sadat could have pursued the American channel without first staging a war, that Washington’s interest in a settlement did not require Egyptian blood to be awakened, and that the war’s true function was to burnish the president’s domestic standing rather than to unlock a door that was already ajar. From this angle, the brilliance of the maneuver looks different: a leader who sacrificed his own soldiers to create the drama that his diplomacy then resolved, when a quieter path might have reached the same destination.

Both readings contain truth, and fairness requires holding them together. The stalemate before 1973 was real, and the diplomatic record gives little reason to think it would have dissolved on its own; Israel’s government felt no pressure to concede anything, and the Nixon administration had shown no appetite for a Middle East initiative until the war forced its hand. At the same time, the cost was real too, and the claim that the war was the only possible instrument rests on a counterfactual that cannot be tested. What can be said is that Sadat understood the mechanics of power more clearly than his critics and his admirers alike sometimes admit. He knew that in international politics, attention is a scarce resource, and that a limited war was the price of purchasing it. Whether the price was necessary or merely effective is the question that keeps the debate alive.

The war also had to be sold at home, and Sadat proved as skillful at that task as at the diplomacy. The crossing of the canal was commemorated as a national triumph, the redemption of the disgrace of 1967, and the president wrapped himself in its glory with a thoroughness that made the victory inseparable from his person. October 6 became a national holiday, and the narrative of restored honor served a double purpose: it legitimized the sacrifices of the war and it legitimized the leader who had ordered it. This domestic framing was not mere vanity. Sadat needed the public to believe that Egypt had fought and won, because only a public that felt victorious would tolerate the concessions and compromises that real negotiations would demand. The war’s meaning, in the end, was manufactured as carefully as its conduct, and the manufacturing was part of the strategy.

Toward the Boldest Stroke

By 1977, the transformation of Egypt’s position was complete in every dimension that mattered. The Soviet advisers had been gone for five years, and the friendship treaty that once formalized the alliance was a dead letter. The American channel, opened by the expulsion and widened by the war, was now the main conduit of Egyptian diplomacy, and Kissinger’s successors in Washington dealt with Cairo as a matter of course. Two disengagement agreements had returned portions of Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty and established the machinery of monitored separation that made further steps conceivable. At home, the October Paper had committed the regime to a western-facing economic future, however contested its implementation remained.

Sadat had achieved something that few observers thought possible when he took power in 1970. He had broken the Soviet embrace without losing Egypt’s security, fought a war that restored national honor without becoming a catastrophe, and converted military effort into diplomatic standing with the one power that could deliver results. The Egyptian leader who had been dismissed as a transitional figure now dominated the politics of the region, and his partnership with Washington was the axis around which every calculation in the Middle East turned.

The stage was set, then, for the boldest stroke of his career. The American channel was open, the Soviet ties were broken beyond repair, and Sadat’s credibility, at home and abroad, had never stood higher. What he chose to do with that accumulated capital would astonish the world a second time, and it would carry him from the triumphs of realignment into the most controversial and consequential gamble of his presidency.

The Journey to Jerusalem

By the autumn of 1977, the search for a settlement between Egypt and Israel had settled into a familiar pattern of stalemate. The Geneva conference that was supposed to revive negotiations kept failing to materialize, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s role remained a deadlock, and the new Israeli government under Menachem Begin seemed, to most observers, even less inclined to bargain than its predecessors. In Cairo, Anwar al-Sadat had grown impatient with a diplomatic process that produced communiques instead of movement. He had also begun to sense that the moment was ripening. The American president, Jimmy Carter, had declared his intention to pursue a comprehensive peace, and the Egyptian president had concluded that waiting on the collective Arab position, which had held firm against any separate arrangement with Israel, would leave Egypt exactly where it had been since 1973: holding the military gains of the October War but unable to convert them into the recovery of Sinai.

On 9 November 1977, Sadat appeared before the People’s Assembly, Egypt’s parliament, and delivered a speech that landed on the Arab world like a detonation. In a long address reviewing the economic and political situation, he suddenly declared his readiness to go “to the ends of the earth” for peace, even to the Israeli parliament itself, if doing so would spare Egyptian soldiers and Israeli soldiers alike from dying in another war. The phrasing was deliberate and electric. No Arab leader had ever suggested standing in the Israeli Knesset. The hall erupted, and within hours the speech was being parsed in every chancellery from Riyadh to Washington. Sadat had not mentioned a concrete plan, a date, or any negotiation agenda. He had simply announced, in public, that he was prepared to break the deepest taboo of Arab politics: direct, visible contact with the enemy, on the enemy’s own ground.

The shock in the Arab world was immediate and profound. Syria denounced the speech as a betrayal. The Palestine Liberation Organization condemned it. Arab foreign ministers, meeting in Tunis shortly afterward, tried to absorb the blow by adopting positions that condemned any separate peace while still leaving the door open to Cairo. But Sadat had not asked their permission, and he did not wait for their verdict. Within days of the speech, he began signaling through intermediaries that the offer was serious. He told foreign journalists that he meant exactly what he had said. He met with American officials who rushed to Cairo to determine whether the speech was rhetoric or policy, and he convinced them it was the latter.

Menachem Begin, who had been in office as Israel’s prime minister only since the summer, understood at once what was being offered. Sadat’s gesture gave him something no Israeli leader had ever received from an Arab counterpart: public recognition of Israel’s existence as a negotiating partner, delivered in a forum that could not be taken back. Begin moved quickly. He wanted the visit, but he also wanted it framed as a response to an invitation rather than an Egyptian improvisation. The formal invitation was delivered to Sadat through the American ambassador in Cairo, giving the initiative the imprimatur of Washington and making it a matter of state rather than theater. Sadat accepted at once. Preparations that would normally take months were compressed into a matter of days, with Israeli and Egyptian security officials, who had never cooperated on anything, working around the clock to arrange the visit of a man half the Arab world now called a traitor.

How was Sadat’s November 1977 visit to Jerusalem arranged?

Sadat opened secret contacts through Romania’s Ceausescu, who carried messages between Cairo and Jerusalem, and through Morocco, where the king hosted a quiet meeting between Egyptian and Israeli officials. President Carter encouraged the effort. Begin then extended a formal invitation, delivered through the American ambassador in Cairo, and Sadat landed at Ben Gurion Airport on 19 November 1977.

The Knesset Speech

Sadat’s aircraft touched down on the evening of 19 November 1977, and the imagery of that landing has never quite lost its power. The Egyptian president stepped off the plane onto Israeli soil to a twenty-one gun salute, inspected an honor guard of Israeli soldiers, and shook hands with Menachem Begin on the tarmac. The next day, he addressed the Knesset. He spoke in Arabic, with the speech broadcast live across the region, and he chose his themes with the care of a man who understood that he was addressing not only the members seated before him but the whole Arab world watching from behind its borders. He spoke of “no more war” and “no more bloodshed,” phrases that would echo through every subsequent negotiation. He said he had come to build a durable peace based on justice. He did not concede the Palestinian cause; he insisted that peace required the resolution of the Palestinian question and the withdrawal from occupied territory. But he framed these demands in a new vocabulary, the vocabulary of reconciliation rather than rejection.

The reception inside the Knesset was rapt and emotional. Members who had lived their entire political lives regarding Egypt as an existential enemy listened as an Egyptian president told them he recognized their desire for security and their right to live in peace. Begin, responding, welcomed Sadat’s courage and stressed Israel’s own longing for peace, while holding firm on the issues that divided them. Outside the chamber, the reception was more complicated. In Israel, the visit produced euphoria; crowds gathered, and the press treated Sadat as a heroic figure. In the Arab world, the speech was received as a catastrophe. Syria broke diplomatic relations with Egypt within weeks. The Palestine Liberation Organization called the visit a stab in the back. Arab League states convened emergency meetings and began discussing the sanctions that would follow. Sadat had known this would happen. He had wagered that the recovery of Sinai and the demonstration of Egyptian leadership were worth the cost, and that the Arab world would follow once it saw results.

What the visit achieved, beyond its drama, was to break the psychological barrier that had made negotiations impossible. Before Jerusalem, no Egyptian and no Israeli leader had spoken to one another in the open. Afterward, the question was no longer whether the two sides could meet but what they could agree upon. The Knesset speech had committed Sadat publicly to a peaceful settlement, and it had committed Begin publicly to reciprocating the gesture. But it had also revealed the gulf between them. Sadat wanted a comprehensive settlement that included the Palestinians and the return of all occupied territory; Begin wanted peace with Egypt on terms that left Israel’s position in the West Bank essentially untouched. Bridging that gulf would require an outside power willing to invest its full prestige in the effort. That power was the United States, and its president was about to discover just how much of himself the task would demand.

Carter’s Mediation and the Road to the Summit

In the months after Jerusalem, negotiations proceeded in fits and starts. Sadat and Begin met again at Ismailia in December 1977, a visit that carried symbolic symmetry but produced no breakthrough. Military and political committees were established to work on the details of a settlement, and they promptly bogged down on the two issues that had always divided the sides: the extent of Israeli withdrawal and the political future of the Palestinians. By the spring of 1978, the momentum of Jerusalem had dissipated. The United States tried to revive it. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance shuttled between the capitals. The American administration floated proposals. Each side blamed the other for intransigence, and each side was, in its own terms, correct.

Jimmy Carter watched the drift with growing frustration. He had staked his foreign policy on the possibility of a comprehensive Middle East peace, and he could see the opening created by Sadat’s visit closing. He was also developing a personal understanding of the two men that would prove essential. He found Sadat expansive, emotional, and driven by a sense of historical mission, a leader who wanted the sweep of a grand settlement and grew impatient with technical detail. He found Begin legalistic, meticulous, and immovable on matters of principle, a negotiator who would concede nothing without exact language defining what he gave and received. The two men respected one another after Jerusalem, but they negotiated past one another. Carter concluded that only a summit, with the three leaders isolated from their bureaucracies and from the press, could force a decision. He proposed Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, as the venue. Both men accepted, though neither believed at the outset that thirteen days in the Maryland hills would produce what months of diplomacy had not.

The stakes of the summit were enormous, and all three leaders knew it. For Sadat, Camp David was the test of the Jerusalem gamble: if it produced the return of Sinai and a credible path on the Palestinian question, his break with the Arab consensus would be vindicated. If it failed, he would be isolated without even the territory to show for it. For Begin, the summit was an opportunity to secure peace with the strongest Arab state while preserving Israel’s essential positions on the West Bank and on security. For Carter, it was a gamble of presidential prestige. He told his aides that if the summit failed, it would damage his presidency. He went ahead anyway.

How were the Camp David negotiations structured over thirteen days?

The summit ran 5 to 17 September 1978, with Sadat and Begin housed in separate cabins while President Carter shuttled between them. Carter’s staff drafted a single negotiating text that both sides revised instead of exchanging proposals. Talks nearly collapsed more than once, Sadat nearly leaving, until marathon mediation produced agreement in the small hours of the final night.

The Two Frameworks

When the agreement was announced on the night of 17 September 1978, it took the form of two documents, called frameworks, and the distinction between them mattered enormously. The first was the Framework for Peace in the Middle East. This was the comprehensive document, the one that addressed the wider conflict. It promised that the basis for peace would be United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and the right of all states in the area to live in peace. It laid out a process for the West Bank and Gaza: a transitional period during which the inhabitants would gain full autonomy, elected self-governing authorities would be established, Israeli military government and its civilian administration would be withdrawn, and negotiations would determine the final status of the territories. It also called for negotiations between Israel and its other neighbors, meaning Jordan and Syria, to reach peace treaties on the same principles.

The second was the Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel. This was the bilateral document, and it was specific where the first was general. It committed Egypt and Israel to negotiate a peace treaty within three months. It set out the terms: full Israeli withdrawal from Sinai to the internationally recognized border, the establishment of normal peaceful relations between the two countries, and security arrangements to guarantee the peace, including limited force zones, United Nations forces, and early warning stations. It also provided for the normalization of relations, meaning diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties, and for negotiations on the precise timetable of withdrawal.

The plain meaning of the two documents was this. Egypt was getting Sinai back, all of it, in exchange for a full peace with Israel. The Palestinian question was getting a process, a promise of autonomy negotiations, without any guarantee of their outcome. Sadat accepted this asymmetry because he believed the process would lead somewhere and because the return of Sinai was the non-negotiable core of his mission. Begin accepted it because the autonomy provisions committed Israel to very little in practice while securing the prize he valued most: peace with Egypt, which removed the strongest Arab army from the military equation. The Americans accepted it because Carter had a signed agreement, and he intended to make it hold. Each party read the frameworks differently, and each reading would shape the years that followed. But on the night of 17 September, the achievement was real: for the first time, an Arab state and Israel had agreed on paper to the terms of a comprehensive framework for peace.

The Treaty of 1979

The three months envisioned for negotiating the treaty stretched to six, and they were not easy months. The autonomy negotiations for the West Bank and Gaza, which were supposed to proceed alongside the bilateral talks, stalled almost immediately over the same questions that had divided the parties at Camp David. The Egypt-Israel treaty itself ran into disputes over the interpretation of the frameworks, over the timetable for withdrawal, and over the linkage between the treaty and progress on the Palestinian track. Sadat insisted that the two were connected; Begin insisted they were separate. Carter intervened repeatedly, and in March 1979 he flew to the region himself, shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem for days, to close the remaining gaps. His personal intervention worked. On the outstanding questions, formulas were found, ambiguities were preserved where clarity was impossible, and a text was agreed.

On 26 March 1979, on the lawn of the White House, Anwar al-Sadat and Menachem Begin signed the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, with Jimmy Carter looking on. It was the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, and its terms were sweeping. Israel agreed to withdraw from the entire Sinai Peninsula in phases, with the withdrawal to be completed within three years, a deadline that would arrive in 1982. The treaty established full diplomatic relations: the two countries would exchange ambassadors, open embassies, and develop normal relations including economic and cultural ties. It set out detailed security arrangements for Sinai, dividing the peninsula into zones with limits on the forces each side could deploy, providing for United Nations peacekeeping forces in the eastern zone near the Israeli border, and establishing early warning stations. It ended the state of war between the two countries, a state that had existed, with brief interruptions, since 1948.

The phased withdrawal unfolded as the treaty prescribed. Israeli forces pulled back from the western and central portions of Sinai in stages through 1980 and 1981. Settlements that Israel had built in Sinai, including the town of Yamit, were evacuated, in some cases amid emotional and even violent scenes as settlers resisted removal. Ambassadors were exchanged, and the Egyptian flag was raised over an embassy in Tel Aviv while the Israeli flag flew in Cairo. The border between Egypt and Israel, which had been the front line of four wars, became one of the quietest borders in the region. Sadat had achieved the objective that had driven him since the October War: the complete recovery of Egyptian territory through negotiation rather than through arms. He had also achieved something larger, the transformation of Egypt’s relationship with Israel from one of permanent hostility to one of formal peace. Whether that peace was cold or warm, whether it would survive him, and what it would cost him at home and in the Arab world, were questions the treaty itself could not answer.

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Committee in Oslo moved with unusual speed. The Camp David agreements had been signed in September 1978, and the following month the committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978 would be shared by Anwar al-Sadat and Menachem Begin. The award was presented that December in Oslo. The citation honored the two leaders for their contributions to peace in the Middle East, recognizing the Jerusalem visit, the Camp David frameworks, and the momentum toward a treaty that the two men had created together.

The prize placed Sadat in rare company. He was the first Arab and the first Muslim to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Egyptian to receive any Nobel Prize. In Cairo, the announcement was greeted with official celebration and a degree of popular pride, though the pride was tempered by the controversy that already surrounded the peace process. The sharing of the prize with Begin, a man whom much of the Arab world regarded as an unyielding adversary, complicated the reception. For Sadat himself, the prize was confirmation of the course he had chosen. He had gone to Jerusalem alone, against the counsel of the Arab world, and the Nobel Committee had judged that the gamble deserved the highest honor the international community could bestow. He accepted it as a vindication, and he carried it as a shield. The prize did not settle the arguments about the peace, in Egypt or anywhere else. It simply marked, in the most public way possible, that the world had noticed what he had done.

The Peace Was Won

Sadat had set out to recover Sinai and to end the cycle of wars with Israel, and by the spring of 1979 both objectives were within reach. The treaty was signed, the withdrawal was underway, the ambassadors were in place, and the Nobel medal was on its way to Cairo. The boldest diplomatic gamble in modern Arab history had succeeded on its own terms. Jerusalem had led to Camp David, Camp David had led to Washington, and Washington had produced a peace that no one had thought possible two years earlier.

But the peace was won, and its price was about to come due.

The Break with Arab Socialism

When Anwar Sadat assumed power in September 1970, he inherited an economy built on the scaffolding of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab socialism. Large private enterprises had been nationalized in the early 1960s, the public sector dominated industry and banking, foreign investment was tightly restricted, and the state administered prices, wages, and foreign exchange through a sprawling bureaucracy. For a decade the model had delivered respectable growth, but by the late 1960s it was running out of momentum. The defeat of 1967 had forced the government to pour resources into rearmament while revenues stagnated, and by 1970 Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves were nearly exhausted. The new president, a man of modest origins who had never managed more than a household budget, inherited a country that was broke and structurally rigid.

Sadat’s response was not announced as an economic revolution at first. His earliest measures were political: the Corrective Revolution of May 1971 removed the remaining Nasserist power centers, and the expulsion of Soviet military advisers in July 1972 signaled a willingness to loosen the partnership with Moscow. But beneath the political drama, the Egyptian leader was already questioning whether Arab socialism could carry Egypt into the 1970s. He resented the dead weight of state enterprises, the hostility of the system to private initiative, and above all the diplomatic isolation that kept Arab oil money and Western capital at a distance. The October War of 1973, which restored Egyptian pride and reopened the Suez Canal in 1975, gave him the authority and the opening to reorient the country. With the guns quiet and the canal generating tolls again, he could credibly argue that Egypt had earned the right to a different future.

The pivot came with a name that would define the decade: infitah, the opening. Where Nasser had treated private and foreign capital as a threat to be contained, Sadat treated it as a resource to be courted. The shift was not merely technical. It was a philosophical reversal of everything the Free Officers had preached since the early 1960s, and it carried consequences that would reach far beyond economics. The president understood that capital would not come to a country still waving the banner of socialism, so the banner had to come down first.

The president had two audiences in mind. The first was the Arab Gulf, whose oil revenues after the 1973 price shock had created pools of capital looking for investment outlets in the Arab world. Sadat courted the Gulf rulers assiduously, presenting Egypt as the natural home for Arab money: a large market, a skilled workforce, and a government finally willing to welcome private ownership. The second audience was the Egyptian emigre community and the domestic private capital that had survived the Nasser years in diminished form. Thousands of Egyptian professionals had built fortunes in the Gulf and wanted to bring their money home, and old commercial families in Alexandria and Cairo still possessed trading networks that socialism had suppressed but never fully destroyed. The infitah was designed, in part, to give all of them a reason to bet on Egypt again.

The October Paper and the Legal Architecture

The program’s blueprint arrived in April 1974 with the publication of the October Paper, a sprawling policy document that Sadat presented as his vision for the country’s future. Named for the October War, it called for an end to economic isolation, the encouragement of Arab and foreign investment, a larger role for the private sector, and a modernization of Egyptian administration. It was put to a national referendum in May 1974 and approved by an overwhelming margin, though observers noted that few voters had read the dense text. The paper’s language was cautious on socialism, which it never formally repudiated, but its direction was unmistakable: Egypt would open its doors to capital from the Gulf, from the West, and from its own returning emigres.

How were the 1974 infitah investment laws drafted?

A committee of economists and legal experts drafted the laws using the October Paper as the blueprint. Law 43 of 1974, governing Arab and foreign capital investment, followed its guidelines closely. The legislation authorized joint ventures, granted tax holidays to qualifying projects, and created free zones where investors operated under relaxed regulations.

What Law 43 Changed

Law 43 was the centerpiece, and it marked a clean break with the nationalization era. It guaranteed foreign investors against future confiscation without compensation, a promise aimed directly at the memories of the 1960s. It permitted full repatriation of profits and capital, offered tax holidays of five to eight years depending on the sector and location, and allowed foreign personnel to be hired without regard to Egyptian labor quotas. Projects could be wholly foreign owned in designated fields, though joint ventures with Egyptian partners, public or private, were the preferred form. Amendments in 1977 under Law 32 broadened the law’s reach, extending its benefits to investment in sectors previously reserved for the state and sweetening the incentives further. The president personally championed the law, treating every signed project as a political victory, and he intervened repeatedly to override bureaucratic resistance.

The legal opening extended beyond a single statute. In 1975 the government liberalized the import regime, replacing a system of strict quotas and licensing with a far more permissive one, and it authorized private foreign exchange accounts and offshore banking arrangements. New legislation permitted private commercial banks to operate alongside the public sector banks, and several Arab and Western institutions soon opened branches in Cairo. In 1976 Port Said was declared a free zone, followed by zones at Alexandria, Suez, and other locations, where goods could be imported, processed, and re-exported with minimal duties or red tape. The message to investors was that Egypt intended to compete for capital on terms the Gulf states and East Asia already offered. Whether the bureaucracy could deliver on that promise was another question, and it would haunt the infitah for its entire life.

A New Business Class

The infitah created, almost overnight, a new kind of Egyptian fortune. The men and women who prospered were not industrialists in the classic sense but intermediaries: import agents, commission representatives for Western firms, construction contractors, real estate developers, and financiers who knew how to navigate the gap between the law on paper and the approvals in practice. They became known, with a mixture of admiration and contempt, as the infitah bourgeoisie, and in the harsher slang of the time as the fat cats of the opening. Their emblem was the imported luxury good, the villa in Heliopolis or Maadi, the Mercedes parked outside a new private bank. For a society that had spent fifteen years praising austerity and public service, the cultural shock was immense.

The engine of the boom was import liberalization. Once the quotas fell, the pent-up demand of millions of Egyptians burst into the open, and consumer goods, electronics, automobiles, and processed food poured through Alexandria and Port Said. Imports grew far faster than exports, and the trade deficit widened dramatically. But the same years brought new revenue streams that masked the imbalance. Oil prices had quadrupled after 1973, and Egypt’s own modest production generated hard currency. The reopened Suez Canal yielded toll revenues that grew each year. Tourism expanded as Western visitors returned, and hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers emigrated to the Gulf states, sending home remittances that by the late 1970s were financing consumption on a national scale. Economists reviewing the period note that gross domestic product growth accelerated to rates of around seven to nine percent a year in the mid to late 1970s, an impressive figure by any regional standard, and one that Sadat’s government publicized relentlessly.

Yet the growth was built on consumption and services, not on productive investment. Manufacturing attracted only a trickle of the capital the new laws had promised, and the public sector, still employing millions, continued to operate at low efficiency behind walls of subsidy and protection. Inflation, already a problem, accelerated as demand outpaced supply, eroding the purchasing power of salaried workers and pensioners. The government borrowed heavily abroad to sustain spending, and by the end of the decade Egypt’s external debt had climbed into the tens of billions of dollars. As the Egyptian economist Galal Amin argued in his influential writings on the period, the infitah had changed the face of the Egyptian economy without changing its productive base: Egyptians were importing and consuming more, but they were not making much more. Others, such as the historian Roger Owen, emphasized that the regime chose the politically easy path, allowing consumption to satisfy rising expectations rather than undertaking the painful restructuring that genuine industrialization would have required.

The private banking sector illustrates both the dynamism and the disorder of the years. New banks channeled Gulf deposits into trade finance and speculation rather than industry, and the line between banking, politics, and influence-peddling blurred. Scandals over sweetheart loans and politically protected deals surfaced repeatedly in the press. Meanwhile the state bureaucracy, far from being reformed, learned to extract its own rents from the opening: approvals, licenses, and customs clearances became opportunities for officials to demand payment, and the cost of doing business in Egypt remained high despite the liberal laws. The president heard the complaints and periodically raged against corruption in speeches, but the system that enriched his allies was not one he was prepared to dismantle.

The most transformative social fact of the decade may have been neither the new laws nor the new banks but the migration. By the end of the 1970s, well over a million Egyptians worked in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, and the smaller Gulf states, and their remittances flowed into nearly every village in the Delta and the Valley. The money built houses with running water, paid university fees, and financed weddings, and it did so outside the state’s reach. The Egyptian leader had not planned this exodus, but it became the infitah’s most democratic dividend: millions of families received their share of the opening not through a government program but through a son or husband working in Jeddah or Riyadh.

The Uneven Price

Who gained from the infitah and who paid for it is the central question of the period, and the honest answer requires holding two truths at once. On one side, the opening delivered real and visible improvements. Living standards rose for a broad middle class that could now buy goods unavailable for a generation. New neighborhoods, highways, and infrastructure projects reshaped Cairo and Alexandria. Egyptians working abroad sent money home that built houses, paid for education, and lifted entire villages out of poverty. Tourism and the canal brought in revenues that the Nasser years had never known. For the young professional or the skilled worker with a connection to the Gulf, the 1970s felt like liberation after decades of gray conformity. Assessments sympathetic to the regime, voiced by officials and some Western economists at the time, credited the infitah with rescuing Egypt from the stagnation of the late Nasser period and integrating it into the regional and global economy.

On the other side, the gains concentrated at the top, and they concentrated fast. The infitah bourgeoisie numbered in the thousands while the public sector workforce numbered in the millions, and the distance between them grew into a social chasm. Agriculture, which employed roughly half the workforce, was left behind by policies that favored urban consumption over rural investment: price controls on key crops kept farm incomes low, reclaimed desert land benefited large operators more than smallholders, and the countryside watched the cities feast. The public sector, supposedly modernized, was instead squeezed between rising costs and politically frozen prices, and its workers saw their real wages fall. Galal Amin’s mordant observation was that Egypt had imported the consumption patterns of the West without importing the productive capacity to pay for them, and the bill fell on the poor in the form of inflation and on the state in the form of debt.

Corruption allegations poisoned the public conversation around the opening. Newspapers carried stories of officials who had entered government with modest salaries and left with villas and foreign accounts. Businessmen cultivated protectors in the ruling party and the security services, and contracts, import agencies, and land deals flowed to the well connected. The regime’s response combined occasional prosecutions with a broader tolerance: Sadat needed the new business class as his political base against the left, and he understood that genuine anti-corruption campaigns would implicate men close to him. Critics across the political spectrum, from Marxists who saw the infitah as a betrayal of the revolution to Islamists who saw it as moral rot, agreed on little else but converged on the charge that the opening had enriched a parasitic few. That charge, however polemical, reflected a widely felt reality: the door was open, but the doorkeeper charged admission.

The public sector worker occupied the cruelest position in the new order. Nominally still the backbone of the revolution’s economy, he watched his real income shrink while his neighbor the import agent prospered, and he read in the government press that he belonged to an obsolete model. Strikes and protests in the large industrial towns of the Delta and Upper Egypt punctuated the late 1970s, and they carried an economic complaint that was also a moral one: the opening had changed the rules of the game after the game was half played. Sadat’s government answered with a mix of wage concessions and police action, but it never answered the underlying question of what the public sector was supposed to become in an economy it no longer led.

A fair assessment, and one shared by several economic historians of the period, is that the infitah was neither the disaster its enemies claimed nor the miracle its architects promised. It broke the institutional monopoly of the state and created space for genuine enterprise, and some of the private firms founded in those years became legitimate, productive businesses. But it failed to transform the productive structure of the economy, deepened inequality, and saddled the state with debts and deficits that limited its freedom of action. The opening changed how Egyptians lived more than it changed what Egyptians made. This tension between consumption and production is a recurring thread in the wider story of modern Egypt since 1952, and the infitah years mark its sharpest expression to that date.

American Aid and the Peace Dividend

The peace treaty with Israel in 1979 transformed the economics of the relationship between Cairo and Washington. American assistance, which had grown steadily after 1975 as the United States cultivated the Egyptian leader, expanded into one of the largest bilateral aid programs in the world. Analysts commonly estimated the combined flow at roughly two billion dollars a year in military and economic assistance, a figure that circulated widely in policy circles though precise totals varied by fiscal year and by what was counted. The package included Foreign Military Financing that underwrote the reequipment of the Egyptian armed forces with American weapons, and Economic Support Funds that flowed into infrastructure, commodity imports, and budget support. For Washington, the money purchased a strategic partnership with the largest Arab state; for Cairo, it purchased fiscal breathing room and a patron willing to underwrite stability.

The aid had consequences beyond the balance of payments. It tied Egyptian procurement and much of Egyptian development planning to American preferences, and it made the Egyptian economy dependent on a revenue stream that was, in principle, subject to the politics of a foreign legislature. Supporters of the arrangement argued that the assistance funded schools, water systems, and telecommunications that improved millions of lives, and that the military component modernized an army that needed it. Skeptics replied that the aid subsidized the same consumption-heavy pattern as the rest of the infitah and deepened the government’s distance from productive reform. What neither side disputed was the scale: the peace had a price tag, and Washington was paying a large share of it.

Two Days in January 1977

The social cost of the opening exploded into the open on January 18, 1977, when the government announced steep cuts in subsidies on basic goods, including flour, sugar, rice, and cooking oil, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the weight of the budget deficit. Cairo, Alexandria, and cities across the country erupted in two days of rioting on a scale Egypt had not seen in decades. Crowds attacked symbols of the infitah’s excess, buses, government buildings, and the property of the rich, while security forces struggled to contain the unrest.

Sadat, who had initially denounced the rioters as a foreign-inspired conspiracy, reversed the cuts within days and restored the subsidies. The episode demonstrated the hard limit of the infitah: the regime could open the economy to capital, but it could not withdraw the bread on which the poor depended without risking its own survival.

The economy had been opened, but the political price of the peace was still being counted. Sadat had remade Egypt’s economic orientation in less than a decade, dismantling Arab socialism, courting foreign capital, and binding the country’s finances to Washington and the Gulf. The growth figures were real, the new wealth was visible, and the debts were mounting. What remained unsettled was whether the opening could survive its own contradictions, and what the Egyptian leader would be asked to pay for the choices he had made.

The Price of the Peace

How was the Nobel Peace Prize decision received in Cairo and Jerusalem?

In Jerusalem and Washington, the award was greeted as triumph. Menachem Begin returned a vindicated statesman, and American officials called it a milestone in the search for Middle East peace. In Cairo, the reception was mixed and muted. Sadat shared the honor, but many Egyptians saw little to celebrate, while Arab capitals condemned the prize as a reward for surrender.

The Treaty and the Break

The Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed in Washington on 26 March 1979 was, on paper, the fulfillment of everything Sadat had promised since his flight to Jerusalem. The full text pledged an end to the state of war, Israel’s phased withdrawal from the Sinai, mutual recognition, and the exchange of ambassadors. For the first time since Israel’s founding, an Arab state had put its name to a bilateral peace with the Jewish state, and the diplomatic world applauded. In Jerusalem, the treaty was read as a strategic vindication of the Begin government’s hard bargaining: Israel gave back territory but kept its capital, kept the West Bank, and shattered the Arab united front. In Washington, President Carter’s administration presented the treaty as proof that patient American mediation could reorder the Middle East. There were celebrations, handshakes on the White House lawn, and the genuine sense that history had turned a page. But the applause was loudest where the costs of the deal were lowest. In the Arab world, the treaty was received as something closer to a verdict than a victory, and Egypt was about to learn what the price of a separate peace would be.

Within a day of the signing, Arab foreign ministers began gathering in Baghdad. The emergency summit, convened from 27 to 29 March 1979, produced a cascade of punishments that redrew Egypt’s place in the Arab world for a decade. The summit resolved to impose economic and political sanctions on Cairo, to suspend Egypt’s membership in the Arab League, and to sever diplomatic relations with any Arab state that joined the Camp David process. Two months later the League carried out its decision: Egypt’s membership was suspended, the organization’s headquarters were moved from Cairo to Tunis, and the country that had founded the Arab League in 1945 was cast out of it. In the months that followed, one Arab capital after another broke diplomatic ties with Egypt. The diplomatic rupture was nearly total, and the few exceptions underscore its severity. According to most historical accounts, the only Arab governments that maintained formal relations with Cairo were Sudan, Oman, and Somalia, while the rest of the Arab world treated Egypt as a pariah. Cairo, which had been the political, cultural, and media capital of the Arab world for a generation, suddenly found itself isolated, its diplomats withdrawn, its universities boycotted, and its claim to Arab leadership in ruins. The summits and communiqués of the following years spoke of Egypt as though it were no longer part of the region it had once led.

The isolation was not only external. Inside Egypt, the peace treaty deepened fractures that had been widening for years, and it alienated constituencies that Sadat could once have counted on. The Nasserists and the Egyptian left regarded Camp David as a repudiation of everything Gamal Abdel Nasser had stood for: pan-Arab solidarity, confrontation with imperialism, and the commitment to the Palestinian cause as an Arab rather than an Egyptian matter. To them, Sadat had traded the Arab consensus for a bilateral bargain, abandoned the Palestinians to an Israeli occupation he had no leverage left to end, and mortgaged Egypt’s regional standing for American aid. The economic dimension of the grievance mattered too. Sadat’s open-door economic policy, the infitah, had produced a class of newly wealthy importers and contractors while leaving most Egyptians untouched by its benefits, and the 1977 bread riots had already shown how explosive that resentment could become. From the perspective of the left, peace with Israel did not merely fail to deliver prosperity; it legitimized a government they saw as corrupt, dependent on Washington, and indifferent to the poor. Sadat’s own justifications were consistent: Egypt had fought four wars in twenty-five years, he argued, and each had cost Egyptian lives without recovering a meter of Sinai or advancing the Palestinian cause; peace would return the land, end the drain of war, and free Egypt to develop. Both claims were sincerely held, and neither side accepted the other’s framing. But as the economy stagnated and the treaty’s promised American aid flowed in quantities that ordinary Egyptians could not feel, the left’s indictment hardened into a settled conviction that Sadat had sold the country’s soul and gained nothing tangible in return.

From a different direction, and with far deadlier consequences, came the anger of the Islamist movements. Sadat had initially cultivated Islamist sentiment as a counterweight to Nasserist and leftist influence on campuses and in the professional syndicates, and the Muslim Brotherhood, though never formally legal, operated with a degree of tolerance in the 1970s. But the peace with Israel, which the Brotherhood and the wider Islamist current regarded as an illegitimate recognition of a usurping state, became a theological and political indictment of the president. The militant fringe went further. The organization known as al-Jihad, built around figures such as Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, the author of the pamphlet The Neglected Duty, developed the doctrine that a ruler who made peace with Israel and governed by secular law was an apostate whose removal was a religious obligation. Faraj’s text, circulated in clandestine networks in the late 1970s and 1980, fused anti-Zionism with a broader revolutionary theology, and it found an audience among young men radicalized by the peace, by economic despair, and by the regime’s mounting repression. Sadat’s supporters argued that the president had been betrayed by the very forces he had released from Nasser’s prisons, and that the militants represented a fringe with no claim to speak for Egyptian Islam. The Islamists countered that Sadat had revealed his true loyalties, first in Jerusalem and then in Washington, and that his appeals to Islam were the cynicism of a ruler who used religion when it served him and persecuted it when it did not. The tragedy of the period is that both the regime and its Islamist opponents increasingly spoke the language of absolute moral verdicts, leaving no room for the political middle.

The sectarian dimension made the atmosphere still more combustible. Relations between Egypt’s Muslim majority and its Coptic Christian minority, historically managed through a mixture of custom and state patronage, deteriorated sharply in the late 1970s. A wave of sectarian clashes, most notoriously the riots in the Cairo district of Zawiya al-Hamra in June 1981, left dozens dead and convinced many Egyptians that communal peace was unraveling. Pope Shenouda III, the Coptic patriarch, withdrew from public ceremonies in protest at the government’s handling of the violence, a move Sadat interpreted as a political challenge. The president responded by stripping the pope of his authority over church affairs and confining him to a monastery in the desert, an act that shocked Copts and liberal Muslims alike. Sadat justified the measure as a defense of national unity against sectarian agitation, insisting that neither Christians nor Muslims would be allowed to play with the fire of religious division. His critics saw something different: a ruler who had once flaunted his Islamic credentials turning on the country’s Christians when it suited him, and whose rhetoric about national unity masked an increasingly personal and vindictive style of rule. Beneath these quarrels lay a real and frightening question, which was whether Egypt’s social fabric could absorb the shocks of peace, economic change, and political closure all at once.

For Sadat himself was no longer the magnanimous figure of the early 1970s. The man who had released political prisoners, loosened censorship, and permitted a controlled multiparty system had, by the end of the decade, turned toward a harsher authoritarianism. Constitutional amendments in 1980 removed the two-term limit on the presidency and opened the door to indefinite rule; a Law of Shame was enacted to punish offenses against the regime’s dignity, which critics read as a weapon against the press and the opposition; and the emergency laws that had never fully lapsed gave the security apparatus sweeping powers of detention. Sadat argued that the opposition, on the left and the right alike, was reckless and irresponsible, that the country needed stability to consolidate the peace, and that those who exploited the new freedoms to threaten national unity had only themselves to blame when the state responded. The opposition answered that a peace bought by silencing every critic was a peace without a future, and that the president who had once styled himself a democrat was becoming a pharaoh. The grievances were real, the justifications were not frivolous, and the gap between the two had become a chasm.

The crackdown, the assassination, and the succession

That chasm turned into a crackdown in the first days of September 1981. Alarmed by the mounting unrest, by the Islamist underground, by Coptic protests, and by what he described as a campaign of slander against the peace policy, Sadat ordered a sweeping wave of arrests. According to figures released by the Egyptian authorities at the time, more than 1,500 people were detained in a matter of days, though opposition accounts and later historians have offered a range of estimates around that number. The sweep was indiscriminate in its reach: Islamist militants and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Coptic leaders, university intellectuals, newspaper journalists, and even former government ministers were rounded up and held under the emergency laws. The pope remained confined to his monastery. The arrests decapitated the visible leadership of nearly every current of dissent at once, and Sadat defended the action as a necessary blow against those who would drown Egypt in sectarian and ideological chaos. His opponents, including many who had nothing to do with the militants, saw the crackdown as the act of a ruler who had lost his footing, and who believed that the removal of his critics could substitute for the resolution of the country’s problems. What neither side fully grasped was that the security operation had also removed the very figures whose presence might have restrained the underground, leaving the field to the most desperate and clandestine of the militants.

The blow came on 6 October 1981. Every year on that date, Egypt commemorated the anniversary of the 1973 October War with a grand military parade in Cairo, and Sadat took his place on the reviewing stand as the hero of the crossing, the architect of the war that had made the peace possible. As a formation of artillery passed before the stand, a truck veered from the column and halted directly in front of the presidential box. From the back of the truck, Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli and three fellow militants of al-Jihad leaped down and opened fire with rifles, while grenades were thrown toward the stand. The reviewing stand, packed with dignitaries and senior officers, became a scene of confusion and carnage. Sadat, struck by bullets, fell; he was carried to a military hospital, where he died. Others on the stand were wounded in the attack, and the parade grounds that had been a stage for national celebration became the site of the president’s murder. The killers made no attempt to hide their motive. They were members of the militant underground that regarded Sadat as a traitor to Islam and to Egypt, and in the interrogations and trials that followed they stated plainly that the assassination was punishment for the peace with Israel and for the persecution of the movement. The sober facts are these: the president who had ended Egypt’s wars was killed by men who believed his peace was a crime, and the method they chose, an attack on the national parade celebrating the war he had led, was meant to deny him even the legacy of that victory. The state responded with arrests, trials, and executions, and with the declaration of emergency rule that would shape Egypt for decades. But the damage to the political order was already done.

Into the vacuum stepped Vice President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak had been slightly wounded in the attack on the reviewing stand, but he survived, and the machinery of succession moved with a speed that suggested long preparation. Within days he was acting head of state, and a popular referendum shortly afterward confirmed him as president, beginning a tenure that would extend for three decades, a period examined in detail in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. The transition was orderly, almost mechanical, and that very orderliness carried a message: the state would continue, the peace treaty would hold, and the assassination would be treated as an interruption rather than a repudiation. Mubarak’s Egypt retained the treaty with Israel, maintained the alliance with the United States, and governed under the emergency laws Sadat had invoked, while the promised political opening receded into the indefinite future. The succession thus sealed both the achievement and the ambiguity of Sadat’s final years: the peace survived its maker, but so did the machinery of repression he had built.

The verdict

The reckoning with Anwar Sadat has been conducted in two irreconcilable courtrooms, and any honest verdict must hear both. In the Western imagination he remains the peacemaker: the leader who flew to Jerusalem, who shook hands with his enemy, who traded the cycle of war for a treaty and received the Nobel Prize as the world’s acknowledgment. That image is not a fabrication. Sadat did what no Arab leader before him had dared, and the consequences were concrete: Egypt recovered the Sinai, Egyptian soldiers stopped dying in wars with Israel, and the principle that Arab-Israeli conflict could be settled by negotiation rather than force was established in practice for the first time. For a country that had lost thousands of young men in 1967 and 1973, those were not abstractions. They were land returned and lives spared, and no moral accounting of Sadat’s career can dismiss them.

In much of the Arab world, the counter-image has been equally durable: the traitor who broke the Arab ranks, who abandoned the Palestinians, who accepted a separate peace that left the West Bank and Gaza under occupation and left Egypt’s neighbors to face Israel alone. That image is not a fabrication either. The Baghdad summit, the expulsion from the Arab League, the broken relations and the moved headquarters were the measurable price of the bargain, and the Palestinians did not gain a state from Camp David. The autonomy talks promised in the Camp David Accords withered, the occupation continued, and Egypt’s withdrawal from the confrontation left the other Arab states to manage a conflict in which their strongest member had unilaterally stood down. To call this a betrayal is to use the language of Sadat’s enemies, but the underlying facts, the separate deal, the unredeemed promises, the isolation, are part of the record and must be weighed.

The verdict that survives both indictments is that Sadat made a gamble of genuinely historic proportions, and that he understood the odds. He traded war for peace and Sinai for recognition, and he did so knowing that the Arab world would punish him for it. The gamble succeeded on its own terms and failed on the terms his enemies insisted upon: it ended Egypt’s wars without ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, it won him the world’s highest honor while making him a target in his own capital, and it secured his place in history at the cost of his life. That is the paradox that must be held whole. The Nobel Prize and the assassin’s bullets were not separate judgments on separate acts; they were two responses to a single act, the act of a leader who decided that his country’s interest required a peace his region would not forgive. A smaller man would have accepted the stalemate and survived. Sadat chose the larger risk, and the price was exactly what his critics had promised and his friends had feared: the same courage that won him the Nobel made him the enemy of men who believed killing him was a duty. History does not get to have it both ways, and neither should we. He was a statesman of rare daring whose achievement was real, a ruler whose authoritarianism was real, and a casualty of the very peace he made. That is the whole of him, and the verdict is that the peace was worth the risk he took, even though it cost him everything.

The Sadat Table

Turning point	What the record shows
The war: October 1973	Sadat launched the October War to break the diplomatic stalemate; the canal crossing restored Egyptian pride and gave him the leverage that thirteen years of deadlock had denied him.
The peace: 1977 to 1979	The Jerusalem visit of November 1977, the Camp David Accords of September 1978, and the treaty of 26 March 1979 returned Sinai in phases in exchange for recognition of Israel.
The opening: the infitah from 1974	Law 43 of 1974 opened Egypt to foreign and Arab investment; bursts of growth and a new business class followed, alongside widening inequality and corruption.
The price: 1979 to 1981	Arab League suspension in March 1979, the mass arrests of September 1981, and assassination on 6 October 1981 by al-Jihad militants opposed to the peace.

Study and Revision

Retaining Sadat means holding the gamble and its price together. First, war was the instrument and peace the objective: the 1973 crossing gave Sadat the leverage that thirteen years of stalemate had denied him, which is why the peacemaker began as a war-maker. Second, the peace was a separate Egyptian bargain, not an Arab settlement: Sinai returned in full, but the Palestinian framework of Camp David was never implemented, and Egypt paid for the distinction with a decade of Arab League suspension. Third, the infitah and the treaty belonged to one strategy: opening to the West economically and diplomatically at once, a turn that enriched a new business class while straining the poor. Students who remember those three strands, leverage before negotiation, a separate peace, and a double opening, will keep Sadat straight even when the details blur. For organized review material built for long retention, work through VaultBook’s Egypt history notes, which pairs timelines with recall drills on exactly these turning points. Then test yourself by arguing both sides: make the strongest case that Sadat was a visionary peacemaker, then the strongest case that he betrayed the Arab cause, and notice which argument the evidence actually sustains. Revisit the table above after a week and rebuild it from memory; the gaps will show exactly which links in the chain need another pass.

Q: Who was President Anwar Sadat?

Anwar Sadat was Egypt’s third president, serving from 1970 to 1981, and the most divisive figure in the country’s modern history. Born on 25 December 1918 in the Nile Delta village of Mit Abu al-Kum, he trained as a signals officer, joined the Free Officers, and read the 1952 revolution’s first communique on Radio Cairo. After years in Nasser’s shadow, he succeeded Nasser in October 1970, then purged his rivals in the Corrective Revolution of May 1971. Sadat launched the October War of 1973, expelled Egypt’s Soviet advisers, opened the economy through the infitah, and then stunned the world by flying to Jerusalem in November 1977. The Camp David Accords of 1978 and the 1979 peace treaty with Israel won him the Nobel Peace Prize and recovered Sinai, but they isolated Egypt in the Arab world. He was assassinated on 6 October 1981 by Islamist militants opposed to the peace.

Q: What were the Camp David Accords?

The Camp David Accords were two framework agreements signed on 17 September 1978 after thirteen days of secret negotiations at the United States presidential retreat in Maryland. President Jimmy Carter mediated between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, shuttling between their separate cabins with a single American negotiating text. The first framework, the Framework for Peace in the Middle East, called for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza and a broader regional settlement. The second, the Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, set the terms for a bilateral peace, including full Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. The accords did not themselves end the state of war; they created the blueprint that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 26 March 1979 would follow almost exactly.

Q: Why did Sadat make peace with Israel?

Sadat’s motives remain debated, but the pressures he faced are clear. The October War of 1973 had restored Egyptian pride without recovering Sinai, and the “no war, no peace” stalemate was draining an economy he wanted to rebuild. In his own telling, he had concluded that endless confrontation served neither Egypt nor the Palestinians, and that only direct talks could recover occupied land. Historians add harder calculations: peace would unlock American economic and military aid, cement the shift from Soviet to American patronage, and let him concentrate on the infitah at home. Critics argued he traded a collective Arab cause for a separate Egyptian deal. Whatever the mix of conviction and calculation, the decision was his alone, taken against the advice of much of his own establishment.

Q: How did Sadat differ from Nasser?

The two men shared a Free Officer past and an authoritarian style, but their projects pointed in opposite directions. Nasser built his rule on pan-Arab nationalism, state-led Arab socialism, alignment with the Soviet Union, and confrontation with Israel, and he addressed the Arab world as its would-be leader. Sadat put Egypt first, dismantled much of the socialist economy through the infitah, broke with Moscow in favor of Washington, and chose negotiated peace over permanent confrontation. In manner they differed too: Nasser was the charismatic mass orator of the radio age, while Sadat cultivated the image of a folksy village patriarch and a devout believer. Admirers call this pragmatism; detractors call it the dismantling of everything Nasser built.

Q: Why was Sadat assassinated?

Sadat was assassinated because the peace with Israel made him a target for the Islamist militants who considered any treaty with Israel a betrayal. On 6 October 1981, during the annual military parade marking the anniversary of the 1973 war, Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli and three fellow members of the al-Jihad organization leapt from a truck, threw grenades, and opened fire on the reviewing stand, killing Sadat and wounding others. The plotters acted from a doctrine that ruled by force against a leader they declared an apostate for making peace. Broader anger fed the climate: the September 1981 mass arrests had jailed Islamists, Copts, and intellectuals alike, and many Egyptians resented the peace, the inequality of the infitah years, and Sadat’s tightening authoritarianism.

Q: Did Sadat win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Yes. Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for the Camp David Accords, the award announced in October 1978 and presented that December in Oslo. He was the first Arab and the first Muslim to receive the prize, and the award fixed his image in the West as the courageous peacemaker who had flown to Jerusalem. The reaction elsewhere was bitterly divided. In Israel the prize was celebrated; in much of the Arab world it was denounced as a reward for surrender, and Arab commentators treated the Oslo ceremony as proof that the peace served everyone except the Palestinians. Sadat himself presented the prize as recognition of the painful concessions peace required from both sides.

Q: How did Sadat open Egypt’s economy?

Sadat opened the economy through the infitah, the “open-door” policy launched with the October Paper of 1974 and given legal force by Law 43 of that year on Arab and foreign investment. The laws permitted joint ventures with foreign capital, offered tax holidays and guarantees against nationalization, created free zones, and loosened import controls, reversing the state-dominated model of the Nasser years. The opening attracted Arab petrodollars and Western firms, produced bursts of growth and a visible consumer boom in Cairo, and created a new class of wealthy businessmen. It also concentrated gains among the well-connected, left agriculture and the public sector behind, and deepened inequality, which is why Egyptians still argue over whether the infitah modernized the economy or merely enriched an elite.

Q: What was Sadat’s legacy?

Sadat’s legacy is a ledger with entries on both sides. To his credit, he recovered the entire Sinai Peninsula without another war, ended the cycle of ruinous Arab-Israeli wars for Egypt, moved the country decisively into the Western camp, and opened an economy that had been frozen under state control. Against that stand the costs: Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League and years of regional isolation, an economic opening that enriched a few and strained the many, a political system that grew more authoritarian even as the press grew freer, and a violent death that proved how deeply the peace had divided his own people. The peace treaty he signed has outlasted him by decades, which his defenders call vindication; his critics answer that a peace which required his assassination was never fully made.

Q: What was Sadat’s Corrective Revolution of 1971?

The Corrective Revolution was Sadat’s swift purge of the Nasserist old guard in May 1971, the move that turned a supposedly transitional president into Egypt’s undisputed ruler. Vice President Ali Sabri, Interior Minister Sharawy Gomaa, and presidential adviser Sami Sharaf, the men who controlled the party, the security apparatus, and the presidency’s inner workings, were planning to curb Sadat’s power. Between 13 and 15 May, Sadat struck first: he dismissed Sabri, accepted the resignations of the others, and had them arrested along with their allies in what he called the “power centers.” Show trials followed, and the Arab Socialist Union was brought to heel. The purge removed the last constraint on Sadat’s authority and cleared the way for the 1973 war, the infitah, and the peace initiative.

Q: Why did Sadat expel Soviet military advisers in 1972?

On 18 July 1972, Sadat ordered the roughly 15,000 to 20,000 Soviet military advisers in Egypt to leave within days, ending the deepest Soviet military presence in the Arab world. His stated reason was that Moscow was constraining him: the Soviets supplied defensive weapons but refused the offensive arms he wanted, and their advisers, he complained, acted as supervisors rather than partners. Historians debate how much of the decision was principle and how much was theater. Many argue the expulsion was also a calculated signal to Washington that Egypt was available as a partner, a down payment on the American mediation Sadat would soon seek. Either way, the move stunned Moscow, delighted Washington, and proved that Sadat was willing to gamble his country’s main alliance on a hunch.

Q: How did Sadat shift Egypt’s alliance from the Soviet Union to the United States?

The shift unfolded in stages between 1972 and 1979. It began with the expulsion of Soviet advisers in July 1972, which opened a channel to Washington. The October War of 1973 then gave Henry Kissinger the opening for shuttle diplomacy, producing the Sinai disengagement agreements of January 1974 and September 1975. In March 1976 Sadat formally abrogated the 1971 friendship treaty with Moscow, and the last Soviet military facilities in Egypt were closed. The Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty completed the turn: Egypt became the second-largest recipient of American aid, receiving by common estimates roughly two billion dollars a year in combined military and economic assistance. In less than a decade, Egypt moved from Moscow’s closest Arab ally to Washington’s.

Q: Why did Sadat’s 1977 Jerusalem visit shock the Arab world?

No Arab head of state had ever set foot in Israel, and the Arab consensus held that recognition must come only after a comprehensive settlement including the Palestinians. When Sadat landed in Jerusalem on 19 November 1977 and addressed the Knesset the next day, he shattered that consensus single-handedly. Arab capitals read the visit as a separate Egyptian deal that abandoned the collective cause: Syria, Iraq, and the Palestine Liberation Organization condemned it, and the groundwork was laid for Egypt’s later suspension from the Arab League. The shock was not only political but psychological; Sadat had broken a taboo that had defined Arab politics for three decades, and even Arabs who privately admired his boldness could not say so in public.

Q: Who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat?

Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat. Begin, a former leader of the Irgun underground who had spent his career as a hard-line nationalist, was in many ways Sadat’s mirror image: a man of uncompromising reputation who made painful territorial concessions at Camp David. The Norwegian Nobel Committee honored the two leaders jointly for the accords that ended thirty years of war between their countries. The pairing underlined the prize’s logic that peace requires enemies, not friends, to compromise. In the Arab world, the shared award deepened the sense that Sadat had been honored alongside the occupier, while in Israel it helped Begin sell the Sinai withdrawal to a skeptical public.

Q: How did the 1979 peace treaty return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt?

The Egypt-Israel peace treaty, signed in Washington on 26 March 1979, committed Israel to a full, phased withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula captured in 1967. The withdrawal proceeded in stages over three years and was completed in April 1982, restoring Egyptian sovereignty up to the international border. Sinai was divided into demilitarized and limited-forces zones, with a multinational peacekeeping force, the Multinational Force and Observers, stationed to verify compliance. Egypt, in return, recognized Israel, established full diplomatic relations, exchanged ambassadors, and guaranteed free passage through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran. It was the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, and its territorial terms were implemented in full.

Q: Why was Egypt suspended from the Arab League after Camp David?

The suspension was the Arab world’s collective punishment for the separate peace. At a summit in Baghdad in March 1979, called in response to the Egypt-Israel treaty, Arab states voted to suspend Egypt’s membership in the Arab League, move the League’s headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, and break diplomatic relations. Only a handful of states, notably Oman, Sudan, and Somalia, kept their ties with Cairo. The measures were meant to pressure Sadat into renouncing the treaty; instead they hardened his defiance, and he presented Egypt’s isolation as the price of leadership. Egypt remained suspended for a full decade, readmitted only in 1989, and the headquarters returned to Cairo the following year.

Q: Why did the January 1977 bread riots erupt in Egypt?

The riots erupted when Sadat’s government, under pressure from foreign lenders to cut spending, announced sharp reductions in subsidies on bread, flour, sugar, cooking oil, and other staples in January 1977. For millions of Egyptians living close to subsistence, the price rises threatened daily survival, and protests exploded on 18 and 19 January across Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities, turning into the largest popular uprising since 1952. The army was deployed, dozens were killed in the clashes, and Sadat, shaken, reversed the subsidy cuts within days and blamed the unrest on leftist agitators. The episode exposed the social fragility beneath the infitah boom and taught Sadat never to touch the bread subsidy again.

Q: Why did Sadat order the mass arrests of September 1981?

In early September 1981, facing mounting unrest, Sadat ordered the detention of more than 1,500 people in a single sweep: Islamist militants and preachers, Coptic Pope Shenouda III (confined to a desert monastery), journalists, intellectuals, leftists, and even former ministers. He accused them of fomenting sectarian strife after a summer of Muslim-Coptic clashes and of plotting against the state. His defenders argue he was trying to preempt violence from an increasingly militant underground; his critics call it the panicked lashing-out of an isolated ruler who had lost the ability to distinguish opposition from treason. The arrests deepened the very alienation they were meant to cure, and several of those jailed would later describe the prisons of September as the forge of the conspiracy that killed him.

Q: Who assassinated Anwar Sadat at the October 1981 military parade?

Sadat was killed by Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli and three fellow members of al-Jihad, the militant Islamist organization led ideologically by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. During the 6 October 1981 parade commemorating the 1973 war, their truck halted before the reviewing stand; al-Islambuli leapt out, threw grenades, and opened fire with an assault rifle while his accomplices sprayed the stand with bullets. Sadat was struck and died shortly after, and several others, including foreign dignitaries, were killed or wounded. The assassins belonged to a current that declared rulers who made peace with Israel to be apostates whose killing was religiously justified. Al-Islambuli and his accomplices were tried and executed in April 1982.