Anwar Sadat: Soldier, Conspirator, Peacemaker, Martyr

Introduction

In the crowded gallery of twentieth-century leaders, few figures are as paradoxical, as courageous, or as ultimately tragic as Mohamed Anwar el-Sadat — the Egyptian president who crossed from war to peace in a single, breathtaking stroke and paid for it with his life. Born in a rural Nile Delta village in 1918 to a family of modest means, Sadat rose through the Egyptian military and political system to become the successor of one of the most towering figures in Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and then reinvented himself so completely that he left Nasser's world almost unrecognizable. He launched a war that achieved by military means what three previous Arab-Israeli wars had failed to achieve. He then, using the credibility earned by that war, made peace with Israel on terms that the Arab world regarded as treachery and that the Nobel Peace Prize committee regarded as among the greatest diplomatic achievements of the century. He was assassinated on the anniversary of the war that made him great, by men who believed his peace made him a traitor.

The full story of Anwar Sadat is simultaneously a personal biography of a complicated, often contradictory man, a history of Egyptian nationalism from its colonial struggles through its postcolonial crises, a narrative of the most momentous diplomatic initiative in Middle Eastern history, and a meditation on the price that leaders pay for breaking with the consensus of their world. It demands to be told in full.

Birth in Mit Abu Al-Kom (1918) and Rural Egyptian Upbringing

Mohamed Anwar el-Sadat was born on December 25, 1918, in Mit Abu al-Kom, a small village in the Nile Delta province of Minufiya, approximately fifty miles north of Cairo. The date places his birth in the final weeks of World War One and — in an accident of historical timing that seems almost symbolic — in the same year that the first stirrings of organized Egyptian nationalism produced the revolution of 1919 against British colonial rule.

Mit Abu al-Kom in the early twentieth century was a typical Egyptian delta village: a community of farmers, smallholders, and agricultural laborers living in mud-brick homes along irrigation canals, following the rhythms of planting, flooding, and harvest that had defined Egyptian rural life since the pharaohs. The population was almost entirely Muslim and deeply traditional. The nearest city of consequence was Cairo, which might as well have been another world in terms of economic and cultural distance.

Sadat's father, Mohamed el-Sadat, was a government clerk — a modest but stable position that placed the family slightly above the purely agricultural class while still firmly rooted in rural Egypt. His mother, Sit el-Barrein, was of Sudanese background — her own mother was from Sudan — which gave Anwar a slightly darker complexion than was typical in his Nile Delta community, a physical characteristic that he later described with characteristic directness in his memoirs, acknowledging that it marked him as different and that in the Egypt of his youth, this difference carried social weight. The racial hierarchies of colonial and early postcolonial Egypt were real, and being darker-skinned was not advantageous in elite military and political circles dominated by lighter-complexioned Egyptians with Turkish or Circassian ancestry.

The family was large — Anwar had twelve siblings — and money was tight. His grandmother, who was a central figure in his upbringing while his father worked in Cairo and Khartoum, was a formidable village woman of great personal strength, and Sadat later credited her with shaping his early character. He spent much of his childhood in Mit Abu al-Kom, absorbing the rhythms of rural Egyptian life, the strength and endurance of the fellahin (peasant farmers), and a deep emotional connection to the land and the people of the Nile Delta that he would carry throughout his life.

The village was also the setting for Sadat's first serious encounter with a historical figure who would shape his thinking profoundly: Mahatma Gandhi. As a boy in the 1920s and early 1930s, Sadat read newspaper accounts of Gandhi's campaigns of nonviolent resistance against British colonial rule in India. The parallel with Egypt, where British occupation was deeply resented and where Egyptian nationalists were struggling for independence, was obvious. Sadat was entranced by Gandhi — by the idea that a man armed with nothing but moral authority and the will of his people could challenge and eventually defeat an imperial power. Gandhi's strategy of using peaceful civil disobedience to expose the illegitimacy of colonial power resonated with something deep in Sadat's temperament. Throughout his early life, he would describe Gandhi as his greatest personal hero, and traces of this admiration — the belief in dramatic, unexpected gestures that transform the terms of a conflict — can be found in some of Sadat's most consequential later decisions.

At the same time, the young Sadat was drawn to figures of heroic resistance and revolutionary action. He was also deeply influenced by the example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who had transformed a defeated empire into a modern nation-state through sheer force of will and political genius. If Gandhi represented the power of moral authority, Atatürk represented the power of decisive action. Sadat, in his own career, would draw on both.

Military Education and Early Nationalist Activism

Sadat's route out of rural poverty was education, and specifically military education. In the Egypt of the 1930s, the Royal Military Academy in Cairo was one of the few institutions where talented young men from modest backgrounds could obtain training, prestige, and a career path that might eventually lead to significant positions. The fact that it was a "royal" academy — serving the Faruq monarchy under British influence — did not diminish its appeal to ambitious young men of Egyptian nationalist conviction; if anything, the academy was a gathering point for young officers who chafed under British domination and dreamed of an independent Egypt.

Sadat entered the Royal Military Academy in 1938, graduating in 1938 (some sources say 1939 — the exact timing varies between accounts). He was twenty years old and already possessed of strong nationalist convictions. In the academy he formed the friendships and professional connections that would define the next phase of his life. Most critically, he met a fellow cadet named Gamal Abdel Nasser, who would become the most important political relationship of Sadat's life — a relationship of deep collaboration, complex rivalry, and ultimately subordination that would shape Egypt's destiny.

Nasser and Sadat were both passionate nationalists, both from modest backgrounds (Nasser was from a postal clerk's family in Alexandria), and both deeply resentful of the British occupation. But their personalities differed significantly. Nasser was methodical, secretive, intensely organizational in his thinking — the quintessential planner who built the Free Officers Movement cell by cell over years. Sadat was more impulsive, more theatrical, more given to dramatic individual action. These differences in temperament would produce both creative tension and serious friction between them in the decades ahead.

After graduating from the military academy, Sadat was stationed at various posts in Egypt. During these early military years he became deeply involved in nationalist politics, attending political meetings, reading widely in Egyptian and international nationalist thought, and making contact with the various clandestine organizations that were operating against British rule in Egypt. He was one of those young officers for whom the uniform was a cover and a waiting position rather than a career end in itself; the army was the vehicle through which a liberated Egypt might one day be governed, not a permanent commitment to the service of the existing British-dominated order.

Wartime Contacts with German Agents and Operation Condor (1942)

The approach of World War Two to the Middle East created what seemed to Egyptian nationalist officers like Sadat to be a rare opportunity. By 1941-1942, Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps had swept across North Africa and was advancing toward Egypt from the west, threatening to reach Cairo and the Suez Canal. The British were desperate; their position in North Africa seemed precarious. For Egyptian nationalists who despised British rule, Rommel's advance offered a potential deliverance — not because most Egyptian nationalists were ideological Nazis or fascists (though some were closer to fascism than others), but because the enemy of their enemy seemed, in the brutal calculus of colonial politics, a potential ally.

Sadat was not alone in exploring this logic. Several Egyptian nationalist military officers and political figures, representing a range of ideological backgrounds, considered making contact with German forces. The question was how to translate this sentiment into action. Sadat became one of the primary movers in what became known as Operation Condor, a scheme to pass military intelligence to Rommel's forces about British troop dispositions, supply routes, and defensive positions in Egypt.

The operation was organized in cooperation with a pair of German agents, Eppler and Sandstetter, who had been inserted into Egypt by the German intelligence service. Eppler — whose real name was John Eppler and who was also known by the alias Hussein Gaafar — was a German of Egyptian upbringing who spoke Arabic fluently and could move through Egyptian society with some plausibility. Sandstetter was his wireless operator. The two had crossed the Libyan desert with a small team and established themselves in Cairo, where they contacted Egyptian nationalist sympathizers who might provide them with intelligence.

Sadat was among those contacted, and he agreed to facilitate the transmission of military intelligence. The operation was significant enough that British intelligence devoted serious attention to uncovering it; the story of their efforts to track and neutralize the German agents in Cairo formed the basis of Ken Follett's later novel The Key to Rebecca. In reality, British intelligence (in coordination with Egyptian authorities, who were under British pressure) located and arrested the German agents in August 1942. Their espionage ring, such as it was, had produced some intelligence of value, but the decisive offensive capability Rommel needed never materialized; by the time the operation was exposed, the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 had decisively turned the tide against the Germans in North Africa.

Sadat was arrested by British authorities in August 1942, along with several other Egyptian officers suspected of collaboration with the Germans. He was held for some months in an Egyptian military prison and then, after a preliminary investigation, interned in a civilian detention facility. The British did not put him on trial at this point, partly because the evidence was not conclusive enough for a full prosecution and partly because they preferred to handle the matter quietly rather than create nationalist martyrs. He was dismissed from the Egyptian army.

The period of imprisonment and the subsequent years in hiding (roughly 1942 to 1944) were a formative experience that Sadat later wrote about with considerable introspection in his memoir In Search of Identity. He described sitting in prison contemplating his situation, reading, thinking, and developing his philosophy of life. It was in prison that he began the habit of extended meditation and what he described as a kind of interior silence — the ability to sit with himself, to examine his own thoughts and motivations without distraction — that he would reference throughout his later life as a source of strength. He compared this prison experience to Gandhi's periods of imprisonment, finding in it not degradation but a kind of purification.

Escape, Years in Hiding, and Return

Sadat escaped from his detention facility (the Cairo General Hospital, where he had been transferred for medical treatment) in late 1944. The escape was relatively straightforward — he simply walked out — but it left him in a precarious position. He was a wanted man, dismissed from the army, with limited resources. For approximately two years, 1944-1946, he lived in hiding, using various assumed names and working in a variety of manual jobs including as a laborer and a small transport operator, living in a modest lifestyle far removed from his earlier military career.

During this period, Sadat was also drawn into a more extreme form of nationalist violence. In collaboration with other nationalist activists, he became involved in a plot to assassinate Amin Osman Pasha, a prominent Egyptian politician closely associated with British interests, who was regarded by Egyptian nationalists as a collaborator with the British occupation. Amin Osman was assassinated in January 1946, and Sadat was arrested and tried as a co-conspirator in the murder. After a lengthy trial, he was acquitted for lack of direct evidence in 1948, but the case had kept him in prison for much of 1946-1948.

The years of hiding, prison, and clandestine activity hardened Sadat's determination and clarified his political thinking. By the time he was acquitted and released in 1948, he was a seasoned underground operative with a record of genuine risk-taking for the nationalist cause. He was also, by now, deeply embedded in the network of nationalist officers around Nasser who would eventually execute the 1952 revolution.

He was reinstated in the Egyptian army in 1950, and the years from 1950 to 1952 saw him rejoin the inner circle of the Free Officers Organization, the clandestine network of military officers planning to overthrow the Egyptian monarchy and end British occupation.

The Free Officers Movement and the 1952 Revolution

The Free Officers Organization — al-Dabt al-Ahrar in Arabic — was a secret society of Egyptian military officers that Nasser had been organizing since the late 1940s, drawing on the network of like-minded nationalists he had been cultivating since his military academy days. By 1952, the organization had members at multiple levels of the Egyptian military and had developed a detailed plan for a coup. The trigger was the humiliation of the Egyptian army in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, in which Egypt had suffered significant military defeats that were attributed in part to the corruption of the monarchy and the incompetence of the political establishment, and in part to the failure of British-influenced Egyptian military leadership. The 1952 revolution was not caused by the 1948 war alone, but the war's outcome fueled the revolutionary ferment within the officer corps.

In the early hours of July 23, 1952, the Free Officers launched their coup. Military units moved to seize key facilities in Cairo — the army headquarters, the broadcasting station (Radio Cairo), the telephone exchange, key bridges and government buildings. The coup was executed with remarkable efficiency and with minimal bloodshed; the corrupt Faruq monarchy had so little genuine popular support that resistance was essentially nil.

Sadat's specific role in the coup has been a matter of some historical dispute. By his own account, he was assigned to make the announcement of the revolution over Radio Cairo in the early morning hours of July 23. He describes arriving at the radio station, waiting for the signal that the coup had succeeded, and then reading the announcement that the Free Officers Movement had taken power and that the era of corruption and colonialism was over. This moment at the microphone — the public face of the revolution's announcement — gave Sadat a prominent symbolic role in the 1952 event that he would later claim as central to his revolutionary credentials.

Others in the Free Officers inner circle recalled Sadat's role somewhat differently, suggesting he was a somewhat peripheral figure in the actual planning and execution of the coup compared to Nasser's core group. This tension between Sadat's self-presentation and others' recollections is characteristic of revolutionary history generally; participants often remember their own roles as more central than contemporaries recall them being. What is beyond dispute is that Sadat was a genuine member of the Free Officers organization, had risked his career and his freedom for Egyptian nationalism throughout the 1940s, and played a real if not necessarily pivotal role in the July 1952 revolution.

Roles Under Nasser: Journalist, Assembler, and Vice President

The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 overthrew the monarchy, sent King Faruq into exile, and established first a transitional military government (the Revolution Command Council) and then, progressively, a civilian political order under strong military influence. The process by which Nasser emerged as Egypt's undisputed leader was gradual rather than immediate: in the first year after the coup, General Muhammad Naguib served as the formal figurehead while Nasser operated as the real power behind the scenes. By 1954, Nasser had consolidated his personal control, outmaneuvered Naguib, and established himself as Egypt's dominant political figure.

Sadat's positions during the Nasser era were significant but clearly subordinate to Nasser himself. In the early years of the new regime, Sadat was given a platform in the media: he became the editor of Al-Gomhuria (The Republic), one of Egypt's leading newspapers, which under Sadat's editorship served as a vehicle for Nasserist ideology, Arab nationalist thought, and the revolutionary government's messaging. The position was more propagandistic than journalistic in the conventional sense, but it gave Sadat public visibility and a platform from which to develop his public persona.

Over the subsequent years, Sadat held various positions within the Nasserist system. He served as a member of the National Union — Nasser's single-party political organization — and later as a member of various governmental bodies. In 1960, he was appointed Speaker of the National Assembly, one of the more prominent ceremonial positions in the Egyptian political system. As speaker, he presided over the legislative debates of a parliament that operated in a political context where Nasser's executive authority was supreme and the assembly's role was more ratificatory than genuinely legislative.

Sadat's most important formal position before becoming president was that of Vice President, to which he was appointed by Nasser in December 1969, just months before Nasser's death. This appointment was not entirely surprising given Sadat's long service, but it was also not the appointment that most observers would have predicted for a truly important role: Sadat was widely regarded within the Egyptian political system as a loyalist without independent vision, a reliable second-level figure useful for ceremonial and propaganda functions but not a significant policy maker. The Egyptian political establishment's assessment of Sadat as Nasser's shadow proved to be one of the great miscalculations in modern political history.

The nature of Sadat's relationship with Nasser deserves careful examination. They had known each other since the military academy and had been collaborators in the Free Officers Movement. Nasser respected Sadat's nationalist record and his willingness to suffer for the cause — the imprisonment, the years in hiding. But Nasser also, by all accounts, regarded Sadat as something of a subordinate personality, loyal but not particularly independent in his thinking. Nasser was the visionary; Sadat was the implementer. This assessment was reinforced by Sadat's behavior during the Nasser years, during which he was consistently deferential to Nasser's leadership and rarely challenged the dominant Nasserist consensus publicly.

What observers missed, and what became apparent only after Nasser's death, was that Sadat's deference was at least partly tactical. He was watching, learning, and forming his own views on the failures and limitations of Nasserism — the catastrophic defeat in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel, the economic stagnation of Arab socialism, the suffocating influence of Soviet advisors — while publicly maintaining the posture of loyal support.

Nasser's Death (1970) and Sadat's Unexpected Succession

Gamal Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack on September 28, 1970, at the age of fifty-two. His death came at a moment of political exhaustion: Egypt had still not recovered from the devastating military defeat in the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel had destroyed the Egyptian air force in the first hours of the conflict and occupied the Sinai Peninsula. The psychological and political damage of 1967 — the "naksa" or setback, as Nasser's supporters called it — was profound. Nasser had spent his last three years in a kind of physical and emotional deterioration, his health declining and his political dominance increasingly qualified by the consequences of the disaster.

The succession question was resolved quickly and with less disruption than many observers had expected. The Egyptian constitution designated the Vice President as acting president, and Sadat stepped into the acting president role immediately. A national referendum — conducted in the single-party style of Egyptian politics — confirmed him as president on October 15, 1970.

The Egyptian and international political establishment reacted to Sadat's succession with a mixture of condescension and dismissiveness that proved spectacularly misguided. Sadat was widely characterized as a transitional figure, a caretaker who would hold the seat warm until more powerful figures emerged. Egyptian political insiders, including the powerful clique of Nasserist officials who called themselves the "centers of power," fully expected to dominate and effectively control the new president. Western intelligence analysts and diplomats characterized him as a lightweight, a man without serious political vision. The Israelis, whose intelligence services had developed extensive files on Egyptian political figures, similarly underestimated him.

Sadat was aware of how he was perceived, and he later described this period with a dry satisfaction: the men who called him "Nasser's poodle" were about to discover how badly they had misread him.

The Corrective Revolution (may 15, 1971)

Sadat moved against the "centers of power" — the Nasserist internal security establishment that believed it could control him — on May 15, 1971, in a calculated and decisive political stroke that he called the Corrective Revolution. The central target was Ali Sabri, the Secretary-General of the Arab Socialist Union (Egypt's ruling party) and a man with deep connections to the Soviet Union and to the Egyptian internal security apparatus. Sabri and his allies had been preparing what amounted to a soft coup against Sadat, believing they could force him into a purely ceremonial role.

Sadat moved first. In early May 1971, he had Ali Sabri arrested. The arrests quickly expanded to include Sharawy Gomaa (the Interior Minister), Sami Sharaf (head of presidential intelligence), and several other powerful figures who had constituted the inner core of the Nasserist security state. In total, approximately ninety officials were arrested in the May 1971 purge. Some were later tried and convicted of plotting against the state; sentences ranged from imprisonment to (in some cases) death, though the death sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.

The Corrective Revolution was a critical moment in Sadat's presidency for several reasons. First and most immediately, it demonstrated that he was genuinely in control of the Egyptian state, not a figurehead manipulated by more powerful men around him. Second, it broke the institutional hold of the Nasserist security establishment, which had controlled Egypt's internal politics for nearly two decades and which was closely identified with the Soviet Union's influence in Egypt. Third, it signaled a willingness to use decisive, dramatic action to cut through political paralysis — a quality that would manifest again in his most consequential later decisions.

The Soviet connection was significant. Ali Sabri and his allies had been described in Western intelligence reports as the most pro-Soviet faction in the Egyptian leadership, the men most committed to maintaining and deepening Egypt's dependence on Soviet military and economic support. By eliminating this faction, Sadat signaled a potential reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy away from the Soviet alignment that Nasser had established.

The Expulsion of Soviet Military Advisors (july 1972)

If the Corrective Revolution was a statement of internal independence, the expulsion of Soviet military advisors from Egypt in July 1972 was an even more dramatic and far-reaching geopolitical act. Since the mid-1960s, Egypt had relied heavily on Soviet military assistance — weapons, training, advisors — to rebuild its armed forces after the 1967 disaster. By 1972, there were approximately twenty thousand Soviet military personnel in Egypt: advisors embedded in Egyptian military units at every level, pilots flying Soviet aircraft under Soviet command authority, air defense units staffed primarily by Soviet personnel.

This deep Soviet presence was a source of significant tension within the Egyptian military establishment. Egyptian officers chafed at the condescension and paternalism of their Soviet counterparts, who frequently treated Egyptian military personnel as incapable of operating sophisticated equipment without close supervision. The Soviets, for their own reasons, were also reluctant to provide Egypt with the most advanced weapons systems — particularly the MiG-23 aircraft and SCUD missiles that Sadat wanted — because providing such systems would escalate Cold War tensions with the United States.

On July 18, 1972, Sadat announced that he was expelling all Soviet military advisors from Egypt and that they must leave within one week. The twenty thousand Soviet personnel packed their belongings and departed. Egypt's ports were left full of Soviet ships; Soviet-manned air defense systems went silent. It was one of the most stunning diplomatic reversals of the Cold War period.

The geopolitical implications were immediately apparent to American and Israeli analysts. Egypt had cut itself loose from its most important military patron. Without Soviet support, Egypt's military capacity seemed severely diminished. The conventional wisdom in Washington, Jerusalem, and Moscow was that Sadat had made a desperate and destabilizing move, and that it signaled Egyptian military weakness rather than strength.

This conventional wisdom was wrong. Sadat was not expelling the Soviets because Egypt was retreating from its confrontation with Israel; he was expelling them precisely in order to be free to wage war on his own terms, at his own timing, without Soviet veto power over his military operations. He wanted to control the strategic direction of the coming war himself, and he could not do that with twenty thousand Soviet advisors embedded in his military structure. He also wanted to signal to the United States that Egypt was genuinely interested in moving away from the Soviet orbit — a signal that might eventually open a channel to American diplomatic engagement and, through that, to the international framework that would be necessary for any post-war settlement.

The October War (1973): Planning Operation Badr

The October War of 1973 — known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, in Egypt as the Ramadan War or the October War, and in the international press most commonly as the Yom Kippur War — was the most carefully planned military operation in Arab history, and its planning occupied Sadat's strategic thinking from the moment he became president.

The fundamental strategic problem that Sadat faced was one of legitimacy and leverage. Egypt's position in 1971-1972 was not one of obvious military advantage: Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Israeli forces sat on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal behind the Bar Lev Line (a series of fortifications built along the eastern bank), and Egypt's military credibility had been shattered by 1967. The international community was not particularly motivated to pressure Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, because Israel was occupying it securely and the status quo, however unjust from an Egyptian perspective, imposed no costs on the major powers.

Sadat's genius was to understand that this diplomatic stasis could only be broken by military action — not necessarily military victory in the comprehensive sense, but a demonstration that Egypt could fight effectively, that the status quo imposed real costs on Israel, and that a new political reality had been created in which negotiations became necessary. He was not planning to win back the Sinai by military force alone; he was planning to win it back through the combination of military action and diplomacy that would follow.

The plan, designated Operation Badr (named for the early Islamic battle in which the Prophet Muhammad's forces achieved a crucial victory against superior odds), was developed over approximately two years by the Egyptian military's General Staff under Chief of Staff Saad el-Shazly and with Sadat's close personal involvement. It was a plan of extraordinary specificity: the forces assigned, the bridges to be deployed, the crossing points, the anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems to be used, the logistics chain, the command arrangements. The Egyptian military conducted detailed training exercises that simulated the canal crossing without revealing their nature to Israeli intelligence.

The date selected for the attack was October 6, 1973. The choice was deliberate and multi-layered in its significance. October 6 fell simultaneously on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a day when Israeli public life effectively shuts down, when Israeli military reservists would be fasting and in synagogue rather than on duty at their units, and when Israeli communications and radio broadcasting would be minimal. It also fell during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, which gave additional symbolic and motivational resonance to the operation for Egyptian Muslim soldiers. The date was also favorable astronomically for the canal crossing: the angle and direction of sunlight in the afternoon hours of October 6 would blind Israeli observers on the eastern bank looking westward toward the Egyptian positions.

The strategic surprise Sadat achieved was one of the most remarkable intelligence failures in Israeli — and American — history. Despite numerous warning signs, despite messages from the Jordanian king and from a top-level Egyptian source, despite the visible assembly of Egyptian forces along the canal, Israeli military intelligence consistently assessed that Egypt was not going to attack because the Egyptian air force was insufficiently capable to protect Egyptian ground forces from Israeli air power. This assessment, accurate as far as it went for previous Egyptian military thinking, failed to account for the fact that Sadat had planned the entire operation around this Israeli assumption: rather than trying to achieve air superiority (which Egypt could not do), he had equipped his forces with a dense network of Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles that would create an air defense umbrella over the crossing zone, protecting ground forces without requiring air superiority. The Egyptians had a fundamentally new tactical doctrine, and Israeli intelligence had not perceived it.

The Crossing of the Suez Canal: October 6, 1973

At 2:00 PM on October 6, 1973, approximately two hundred and twenty Egyptian aircraft crossed the Suez Canal in a coordinated strike against Israeli military positions in the Sinai. At the same moment, approximately two thousand Egyptian artillery pieces opened fire along the entire length of the canal front, delivering a rolling barrage that targeted the Bar Lev Line fortifications, Israeli command posts, and communications facilities.

Within minutes, Egyptian infantry units began crossing the canal in hundreds of rubber assault boats. Under the cover of the artillery barrage and the air strike, five Egyptian infantry divisions crossed simultaneously at multiple points along a front of approximately one hundred miles. The crossing was the product of two years of detailed planning, and it showed: Egyptian soldiers reached the eastern bank, established beachheads, and began holding ground against Israeli counterattacks within hours.

The Bar Lev Line — the Israeli fortification system along the eastern bank of the canal, which had been described by Israeli military planners as essentially impregnable and which had cost enormous amounts to construct — was breached at multiple points. The Bar Lev Line consisted of a series of strong points (matzavim) positioned at regular intervals along the canal bank, connected by a road and backed by armored reserves. The Egyptian plan for breaching it was audacious and effective: rather than trying to outflank or methodically reduce the individual strong points, Egyptian engineers used water cannons to blast away the sand walls that protected the Israeli positions, creating gaps through which armor and infantry could advance. One hundred and fifty water cannons operated by Egyptian engineering units blasted through the sand embankments that had been constructed as part of the Bar Lev fortifications; the sand simply washed away under the water pressure.

Within the first twenty-four hours, Egypt had crossed the canal with approximately one hundred thousand soldiers and an enormous quantity of armor and equipment. Approximately five hundred tanks crossed in the first day. Israeli counterattacks, conducted by armored units that drove directly toward the Egyptian beachhead without adequate infantry support or artillery preparation, were repulsed with heavy losses. Egyptian infantry teams armed with Soviet-supplied RPG rockets and Sagger anti-tank guided missiles proved devastatingly effective against Israeli armor that had expected air cover and found none, the Israeli aircraft being driven off or shot down by the Egyptian SAM umbrella.

In the north, Syrian forces launched a simultaneous assault on the Golan Heights, creating a two-front emergency for Israel. The first forty-eight hours were the most dangerous Israel had faced since its founding: the Bar Lev Line was being penetrated, Israeli armored counterattacks were failing, Syrian forces were driving deep into the Golan, and the Israeli Defense Forces were in the process of calling up reserves who would take days to fully mobilize.

The Egyptian military's performance in the first days of the October War was genuinely impressive and represented a dramatic transformation from the shambles of 1967. Egyptian soldiers crossed the canal in an orderly fashion, established defensive positions on the eastern bank, and resisted Israeli counterattacks with effectiveness that was not attributable to surprise alone but to genuine improvements in training, equipment, and tactical doctrine.

The Political Genius of the War: Strategic Victory Without Military Victory

The Egyptian success in the first phase of the October War achieved Sadat's core strategic objective: it proved that Egypt could fight effectively and that the 1967 humiliation had been reversed. It broke the psychological and political stasis that had made international pressure for Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai essentially impossible. It gave Sadat the credibility — with the Arab world, with Egypt's own population, and crucially with the United States — that he needed to make the diplomatic moves that would follow.

Egyptian forces advanced approximately twenty-five to thirty kilometers into the Sinai in the first days of the war and then, critically, halted. Sadat's plan called for the initial advance to be conducted within the protective umbrella of the SAM air defense systems, which were positioned on the western bank of the canal and had a range that covered the area immediately east of the canal. Advancing further would take Egyptian armor beyond the SAM umbrella, exposing it to Israeli air power in open desert, precisely the conditions under which the Israeli air force excelled. Sadat intended to stay within the SAM coverage.

The military command, however, was under pressure from Syria — whose forces on the Golan were taking severe punishment from the Israeli counteroffensive — to advance further into the Sinai and draw off Israeli forces. On October 14, over the objections of Chief of Staff Shazly, Egyptian armor advanced beyond the SAM umbrella in a major offensive push designed to relieve pressure on Syria. The October 14 armored offensive was a tactical disaster: advancing in open desert without air cover, Egyptian armor was met by Israeli aircraft and armored units in a battle of maneuver at which Israel excelled. Egypt lost approximately two hundred and fifty tanks in a single day.

This tactical defeat opened the opportunity that Israeli General Ariel Sharon had been proposing since the early days of the war: a crossing of the canal at a vulnerable gap between the Egyptian Second and Third Armies. On October 15-16, Israeli forces pushed through this gap — the area near the Bitter Lakes known as the "Chinese Farm" — and began crossing to the western bank of the canal. By October 16-18, Israeli forces were operating on Egyptian soil west of the canal, driving south to encircle the Egyptian Third Army.

By the time the ceasefire came on October 22-24 (following UN Security Council Resolutions 338 and 339), the military situation had reversed dramatically from its high point of Egyptian success. The Egyptian Third Army — approximately thirty to forty thousand men — was completely encircled on the eastern bank of the canal, cut off from supply by Israeli forces controlling the road from Cairo. Israel had armor on the western bank and could theoretically have driven to Cairo.

And yet — and this is the essence of Sadat's political genius — Egypt had won the war strategically even while facing tactical military reversal. The ceasefire was not called because Egypt was defeated; it was called because both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, intervened diplomatically to stop the fighting before either side achieved a definitive military result. Egypt had demonstrated that it could fight effectively. The Bar Lev Line had been destroyed. Israeli casualty figures — approximately 2,500 killed, in a nation of fewer than three million — were politically devastating in Israeli public life. The oil embargo imposed by Arab oil producers in support of Egypt and Syria had created energy crises in the Western world. The status quo ante bellum, in which Israel held the Sinai and faced no serious pressure to return it, was gone forever.

Sadat had achieved what he set out to achieve. The war of 1973 did not recover the Sinai militarily, but it created the political conditions under which the Sinai could be recovered diplomatically. He had always understood this; his critics who accused him of losing the war militarily missed the point of his strategy entirely.

Kissinger's Shuttle Diplomacy and the Disengagement Agreements (1974-1975)

The aftermath of the October War was managed, on the American side, by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who conducted the first of his famous shuttle diplomacy missions — flying repeatedly between Cairo, Jerusalem, and other Middle Eastern capitals — in the months following the ceasefire. Kissinger recognized, as Sadat had always intended, that the United States was now the indispensable broker of any Middle Eastern settlement.

The immediate priority was relieving the siege of the Egyptian Third Army, which was encircled and in danger of annihilation. After considerable diplomatic maneuvering, a disengagement agreement was signed in January 1974 (commonly called Sinai I), under which Israeli forces withdrew from the western bank of the canal and from a narrow strip of the eastern bank, allowing supply routes to the Third Army to be reopened. Israeli and Egyptian forces separated, with a United Nations Emergency Force interposed between them.

A second disengagement agreement, Sinai II, was signed in September 1975, under which Israel withdrew further into the Sinai, evacuating the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes, in exchange for Egyptian political commitments (including a statement that Egypt would not resort to force to resolve the Sinai conflict) and American commitments of economic and military assistance to Israel.

Both Sinai I and Sinai II were limited technical arrangements rather than comprehensive peace agreements, but they represented a fundamental change: Egypt and Israel were not at war, Egyptian territory had been partially restored, and American diplomatic engagement had been firmly established as the framework for further progress.

During this period, Sadat was also managing Egypt's domestic transformation. He was moving away from Nasser's Arab socialism — the nationalized economy, the state enterprises, the Soviet economic model — toward an opening to Western investment, foreign capital, and market mechanisms. He called this program infitah, the Arabic word for "opening," and it represented a fundamental reorientation of Egypt's economic philosophy.

Infitah and Economic Opening

The infitah policy, launched in the mid-1970s, was Sadat's attempt to transform Egypt's sclerotic, state-dominated economy into a more dynamic, market-oriented system capable of attracting Western investment and reducing Egypt's dependence on Soviet economic patterns. Under Nasser, Egypt's major industries, banks, and significant commercial enterprises had been nationalized; private enterprise was restricted; and the economy operated within a framework of centralized planning that had produced slow growth, significant corruption, and chronic foreign exchange shortages.

Infitah opened Egypt to foreign investment through tax incentives, free economic zones, and relaxed regulations on private enterprise. New hotels and office towers began to rise in Cairo. Western corporations explored opportunities in Egypt's oil sector, its construction industry, and its emerging consumer goods market. Egypt's newly wealthy bourgeoisie, enriched by remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf states following the oil boom, began displaying consumption patterns that Nasserist austerity would never have permitted.

The results of infitah were deeply uneven. A new class of Egyptian businessmen with connections to the government and to foreign capital prospered enormously. But ordinary Egyptians saw little benefit; prices rose, corruption flourished, and the gap between the wealthy few and the urban and rural poor widened visibly. The bread riots of January 1977 — when Sadat's government, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, attempted to reduce food subsidies, triggering massive street protests in Cairo and other cities — were a dramatic demonstration that infitah's benefits were not trickling down. Sadat reversed the subsidy cuts in the face of the riots, but the episode revealed deep social tensions that would continue to fester.

Despite its social costs, infitah was politically significant as a signal to the United States: Egypt was abandoning Soviet-style socialism and positioning itself as a potential Western partner. This signal was essential to the diplomatic opening that would eventually produce the peace with Israel.

The Visit to Jerusalem (november 1977): the Most Dramatic Diplomatic Act of the Twentieth Century

In October 1977, Sadat told a gathering of the Egyptian parliament, in what appeared to many present to be an off-the-cuff remark, that he was willing to go anywhere to discuss peace — including to the Knesset in Jerusalem. The remark caused immediate sensation; the idea of an Arab head of state voluntarily traveling to Israel and addressing the Israeli parliament was so far outside the boundaries of what was considered politically possible in the Arab world that most observers initially assumed it was rhetorical flourish rather than genuine intent.

It was genuine intent. Sadat had been thinking about a dramatic gesture that would cut through the accumulated layers of hostility and mistrust and create a genuinely new political reality. His model, as he explained in his memoirs, was once again Gandhi: the use of a single dramatic act of personal moral courage to transform the terms of a conflict that seemed frozen in place. He believed — correctly, as it turned out — that the Israeli public was genuinely fearful of the Arabs who surrounded them and that a direct, personal gesture of peace from an Arab leader would resonate powerfully with Israeli public opinion in ways that formal diplomatic maneuvering could not.

After brief but intense behind-the-scenes diplomacy to ensure the visit could actually be arranged, Sadat flew to Israel on November 19, 1977. He landed at Ben Gurion Airport to a formal military reception. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a man of the Irgun underground and the Israeli hard right who had been considered one of the least likely candidates for any compromise with Egypt, was there to greet him. The images of Sadat descending from his aircraft onto Israeli soil were among the most striking political photographs of the twentieth century.

Sadat addressed the Knesset on November 20, 1977. His speech was carefully crafted to be both direct and diplomatic, to acknowledge the reality of Israeli existence and security needs while also being unflinching about Arab and Palestinian rights. He declared clearly that Egypt had no desire to destroy Israel — a statement that, coming from an Arab leader on Israeli soil, was received with almost disbelief by his Israeli audience. He said that seventy percent of the psychological barriers between Arabs and Israelis had been broken by this visit alone. He spoke of his religious faith, invoking Abraham as the common ancestor of both peoples, and called for a comprehensive peace that would include the Palestinian question.

The Israeli response was complex. The public reaction was genuinely emotional; ordinary Israelis watched Sadat's Knesset speech in overwhelming numbers on television and were deeply moved by the simple fact of his presence. Begin responded with his own speech, welcoming the visit while being firm about Israel's own positions. The political establishment was divided: some, including the opposition Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, were skeptical about Sadat's ultimate objectives; others saw the visit as a historic opportunity.

In the Arab world, the reaction was furious. Syria, Libya, the PLO, and various Arab radical regimes characterized Sadat as a traitor who had broken Arab solidarity, legitimized Israel, and abandoned the Palestinian cause. The rejectionist front, led by Syria's Assad, immediately began diplomatic and political efforts to isolate Egypt in the Arab world.

Sadat was aware of these reactions and had chosen to make his visit anyway. He was betting that the United States would serve as the indispensable broker of a peace agreement that would return the Sinai and that the Arabs who called him a traitor would eventually reconcile themselves to the peace once it was established. Some of this bet paid off; some of it — the Palestinian question, the Arab boycott — would take far longer than he anticipated, and some costs he would pay with his life.

The Camp David Accords: Thirteen Days in the Mountains of Maryland (september 1978)

The visit to Jerusalem set a process in motion that led, after months of difficult and often stalled negotiations, to the most extraordinary diplomatic event of 1978: the Camp David summit. President Jimmy Carter — who had made Middle East peace a personal priority and who was willing to invest enormous political capital in it — invited Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland for open-ended, face-to-face negotiations under American facilitation.

The summit began on September 5, 1978, and was supposed to last three or four days. It lasted thirteen days, and came very close to complete failure multiple times before finally producing agreement. This extended negotiation, conducted in a deliberately isolated setting away from the press and the pressure of daily political life, was one of the most remarkable diplomatic episodes in American history, and Carter's personal role in it — cajoling, pleading, threatening, proposing and revising draft after draft — was genuinely decisive.

The obstacles were formidable. The core issue was the Sinai: Israel had occupied the entire peninsula since 1967 and had established Israeli settlements there; returning it to Egypt meant not just military withdrawal but the removal of Israeli settlers from their homes, the dismantling of Israeli air bases (including a major base at Etzion), and the fundamental change in Israel's strategic depth. Begin, who had built his political career on the principle of the Land of Israel's indivisibility, found the territorial concessions almost physically painful.

A second and in some ways more contentious issue was the Palestinian question. Sadat felt genuine personal responsibility for the Palestinian people, whom he regarded as the greatest remaining injustice in the Middle East. He wanted any agreement to include a framework for Palestinian autonomy and eventual self-determination. The Israeli position, particularly under Begin, was that Palestinian autonomy could be discussed but that any commitment to Palestinian statehood or to Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza was unacceptable. This gap was not bridged at Camp David; the eventual compromise language on the Palestinians was sufficiently ambiguous to allow both sides to claim they had not conceded their core positions, while achieving no specific commitments that would lead to Palestinian statehood.

Carter's papers from Camp David, released over subsequent decades, reveal the intensity of the negotiations. Sadat at one point threatened to leave — packing his bags and ordering his car — and Carter persuaded him to stay by going personally to his cabin and invoking the stakes for peace. The two men apparently had a genuine emotional conversation during this episode, with Carter describing Sadat's granddaughter's future and his own children's world, and Sadat being moved to remain. Whether this specific account is precisely accurate, the evidence is clear that Carter's personal relationships with both leaders were critical to keeping the process on track.

The Camp David Accords, signed on September 17, 1978, consisted of two framework agreements. The first, "A Framework for Peace in the Middle East," addressed the Palestinian question in deliberately vague language, providing for a five-year transition period of Palestinian self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza, to be followed by negotiations on the permanent status of those territories. It committed Egypt, Israel, and Jordan (which had not been consulted and was not particularly pleased) to negotiate on this basis.

The second framework, "A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel," was far more specific. It provided for Israel to withdraw from the entire Sinai Peninsula over a period of three years, in exchange for Egypt establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel, stationing only a limited Egyptian military force in the Sinai, and agreeing to free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal. It also provided for American security guarantees to both parties.

What each side gained was significant. Egypt recovered the entire Sinai — all sixty-one thousand square kilometers — and could claim that the 1973 war had ultimately achieved its strategic objective. Israel obtained peace with its most powerful Arab neighbor, eliminating the threat of a two-front war and gaining decades of security on its southern border. The United States deepened its strategic role in the Middle East and gained massive influence over both parties through the military and economic aid packages that accompanied the agreements.

What was more controversial was what was given up. For Egypt, the Camp David formula on the Palestinians was a significant retreat from Sadat's original position; he had gone to Camp David hoping for a comprehensive settlement including the West Bank and Gaza, and he left with a vague framework that Israeli governments would consistently interpret in the most restricted possible way. Sadat later expressed private regret at having accepted the Palestinian language as it was written, recognizing that it would not produce a genuine Palestinian settlement. For Israel, the removal of the Sinai settlements was genuinely painful for the settler community, and Begin's decision to concede it was among the most controversial of his political career.

The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty (march 26, 1979)

The Camp David frameworks required translation into a formal treaty, and this process took another six months of difficult negotiation. The Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed on the White House lawn on March 26, 1979, in a ceremony presided over by President Carter, with Sadat and Begin together before an audience of invited dignitaries and a worldwide television audience.

The treaty was the first peace agreement between Israel and any Arab state. It was comprehensive: it established full diplomatic relations (ambassadors were exchanged by 1980), opened borders, provided for the phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai (completed on April 25, 1982), and included the peace-for-land exchange that had been the core of Egyptian strategy since 1967. It also established a multinational peacekeeping force in the Sinai (the Multinational Force and Observers) to monitor compliance with the demilitarization provisions.

Carter's Rose Garden handshake among the three men — American president, Israeli prime minister, and Egyptian president — became one of the iconic images of late twentieth-century diplomacy. Begin and Sadat both spoke; Carter's role was clearly that of the facilitator who had made the impossible possible through persistence, personal investment, and political courage.

For Sadat personally, the peace treaty represented the culmination of his strategic vision. He had set out to break the political stasis that kept Egypt from recovering the Sinai, had launched a war to create the leverage for negotiations, had made the most dramatic diplomatic gesture of the twentieth century to transform the psychological reality, had sat through thirteen days of exhausting negotiations in Maryland, and had signed a treaty that returned Egyptian sovereignty to the Sinai. From a purely strategic standpoint, he had achieved what he set out to achieve.

The Arab World's Reaction: Isolation and Boycott

The Arab world's response to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was swift and severe. On March 27, 1979 — one day after the treaty was signed — the Arab League held an emergency meeting in Baghdad and voted to expel Egypt from the organization. The move was supported by virtually every Arab state. Egypt, the largest and historically most central Arab country, the birthplace of Arab nationalism, the state that had fought more Arab-Israeli wars than any other, was cast out of the Arab family.

The Arab League headquarters, which had been located in Cairo since the organization's founding in 1945, was relocated to Tunis. Arab states severed diplomatic relations with Egypt. Sudan alone initially maintained relations; most other Arab countries recalled their ambassadors or closed their embassies. Egypt was subjected to a comprehensive Arab economic boycott: Arab financial support (which had been flowing to Egypt since 1973), Arab investment, and Arab commercial relationships were all cut.

The practical consequences were significant. Egypt had been receiving substantial financial transfers from oil-rich Arab states since the 1973 war — transfers that had helped stabilize the Egyptian economy. These were now cut. Egyptian workers in Arab countries, who sent home remittances critical to many Egyptian families, faced pressures and in some cases deportation. Egyptian diplomats at Arab capitals were left without counterparts.

For ordinary Egyptians, the isolation was not without costs. But Sadat was able to point to American compensation: the Camp David process had produced commitments of substantial American foreign aid to Egypt, making the United States rather than the Arab states the primary external financial supporter of the Egyptian economy. American military assistance, too, now flowed to Egypt on a large scale.

Sadat's bet was that the Arab boycott would eventually collapse — that the practical benefits of peace and American support would eventually lead other Arab states to reconcile with Egypt. This proved partially correct: Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League in 1989, the headquarters returned to Cairo, and by the 1990s most Arab states had normalized their relations with Egypt. But this reconciliation came too late for Sadat himself to witness.

The Nobel Peace Prize (1978)

Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, recognition of the Camp David Accords that had been signed that September. The award was announced before the formal peace treaty was signed, reflecting the Nobel Committee's judgment that the Camp David frameworks represented a sufficient breakthrough to merit the honor.

The Nobel Committee's citation emphasized the courage both leaders had shown in making concessions that went against the political mainstream in their own countries and in their own political bases. Begin, who had spent his career as a hardline nationalist, had conceded Israeli settlements in the Sinai and full withdrawal from the peninsula. Sadat had defied the Arab world to make peace with the Jewish state.

For Sadat, the Nobel Prize represented international validation of the path he had chosen. Whatever the fury in the Arab world, the wider international community — represented by the Oslo-based Nobel Committee — recognized his achievement as one of the great diplomatic breakthroughs of the twentieth century. He used the platform of the prize to continue articulating his vision of comprehensive Middle Eastern peace, including for the Palestinians.

For Begin, the prize was more complicated; he never fully resolved the tension between his nationalist ideology and the territorial concessions he had made, and he became increasingly rigid and difficult in subsequent negotiations as the political weight of Camp David in his own political base became clearer.

Carter received no Nobel Prize in 1978 despite his central role in the Camp David negotiations. He did eventually receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, when the award citation referred explicitly to his decades of work in international conflict resolution, including the Camp David agreements.

Domestic Repression and the September 1981 Arrests

The final years of Sadat's presidency were marked by an increasingly authoritarian domestic turn that contradicted his international image as a man of peace and democratic progress. As opposition to his peace with Israel and resentment of infitah's social consequences mounted, Sadat responded with growing repressiveness.

The most dramatic manifestation of this authoritarian turn came on September 3, 1981, when Sadat ordered the simultaneous arrest of more than fifteen hundred prominent Egyptians across the political spectrum. The arrested included Islamic fundamentalist leaders (including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and associated organizations), Coptic Christian leaders (including Pope Shenouda III, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church), leftist politicians and journalists, Nasserist intellectuals, Arab nationalist figures, and ordinary citizens who had been critical of the peace with Israel.

The September 1981 arrests were striking in their breadth. Sadat was not merely cracking down on Islamists; he was arresting Copts (who had their own grievances about sectarian tensions in Egypt), leftists, intellectuals, and essentially anyone who had been publicly critical of his policies. The arrests reflected a deep sense of political isolation: Sadat, whose domestic popularity had initially soared after the 1973 war and the return of Sinai, had seen his support erode as the years passed, infitah's social costs mounted, the Palestinian issue remained unresolved, and the peace with Israel failed to produce the economic dividend he had promised.

The Coptic dimension of the crackdown was particularly significant and damaging. Relations between Egypt's Muslim majority and its Coptic Christian minority — which constituted approximately ten percent of the population — had been deteriorating throughout Sadat's presidency as Islamist political movements grew in strength and as sectarian tensions in Upper Egypt produced communal violence. Pope Shenouda had been particularly outspoken about the difficulties faced by Copts under Sadat's increasingly Islamically-inflected political presentation. Sadat responded by placing Shenouda under house arrest and dissolved the Holy Synod, the governing body of the Coptic Church — acts of religious repression that damaged Egypt's image internationally and alienated a significant minority community at home.

The September 1981 crackdown reflected a president who had become politically isolated in his own country — isolated from the Arab world, increasingly at odds with his own population's economic grievances, and unwilling to tolerate the political pluralism that genuine peace might have been expected to encourage. It was the political context of repression and resentment that provided the environment in which his assassins were able to recruit, plan, and act.

The Assassination: October 6, 1981

Anwar Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981 — exactly eight years to the day after the crossing of the Suez Canal that had been his greatest military and political triumph. The date was chosen deliberately by the conspirators; the symmetry was intentional.

The occasion was the annual military parade in Cairo commemorating the October 1973 War crossing. Sadat reviewed such parades from a reviewing stand constructed for the purpose; attendance was a ritual of Egyptian military and political life, the annual celebration of the act that had transformed his presidency and Egypt's international standing. The 1981 parade was particularly significant because it marked the eighth anniversary of the crossing and because, by October 1981, Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai had been substantially restored through the phased Israeli withdrawal.

The assassins were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a radical Islamist organization that had concluded — drawing on the theological arguments of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later imprisoned in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — that Sadat had become an apostate through his peace with Israel, his alliance with the United States, and his repression of Muslims. Their logic followed the theological argument that a Muslim ruler who abandoned Islamic law and allied with the enemies of Islam could be legitimately killed; Sadat's peace with Israel and his arrest of Islamic leaders in September 1981 provided the specific justifications.

The cell responsible for the assassination was led by Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, an Egyptian army officer whose brother had been among those arrested in the September 1981 crackdown. Islambouli's access to a place in the military parade provided the operational opportunity. On the morning of October 6, he and several other conspirators replaced members of a legitimate military unit in the parade formation, loading their rifles with live ammunition and concealing additional weapons in the trucks that would pass the reviewing stand.

As the parade passed before the reviewing stand, a military truck slowed and then stopped in front of the stand. Islambouli stood up, threw several grenades toward the reviewing stand, and shouted that they were killing the Pharaoh — a reference to the Quran's depiction of Pharaoh as the archetypal tyrant. He then opened fire directly at Sadat. Three other conspirators jumped from the truck and also opened fire with automatic weapons.

Sadat, who had been standing at the reviewing stand watching the military equipment pass, was struck by multiple bullets and fell. Several of his aides and foreign guests were also killed or wounded in the attack; the violence was not targeted precisely and the fusillades struck anyone near the president. Vice President Hosni Mubarak, who was sitting beside Sadat at the moment of the attack, was uninjured.

Sadat's personal behavior in the immediate seconds of the attack has been a matter of considerable retrospective attention. Multiple witnesses reported that when the grenade was thrown and the shooting began, Sadat initially stood to receive the attackers rather than taking cover — behavior that some accounts attribute to instinctive military pride (a commander does not run), others to the initial confusion about whether this was a planned part of the ceremony, and others to simple shock. He was struck before he had time to take meaningful evasive action.

Sadat was rushed to a military hospital by helicopter; surgeons worked for hours to save him but his wounds were too severe. He was declared dead at approximately 2:40 PM on October 6, 1981. He was sixty-two years old.

Islambouli and the other assassins were captured at the scene or shortly afterward. They were tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad on April 15, 1982.

The Funeral: Three Former Presidents and Empty Arab Chairs

Anwar Sadat's funeral on October 10, 1981, was attended by an extraordinary gathering of international dignitaries and was simultaneously marked by a notable absence that spoke volumes about his position in the Arab world. Three former American presidents — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon — attended the funeral, along with a vast array of current and former world leaders from Western nations, Israel (represented by Prime Minister Begin), and other non-Arab countries. French President François Mitterrand attended. The United Nations sent its Secretary-General. Israel's delegation included Prime Minister Begin, who sat near the casket and wept openly.

Not a single serving Arab head of state attended. Egypt's own Arab neighbors — Syria, Libya, Jordan (whose King Hussein eventually attended), Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab states — boycotted the funeral of the man who had been the leader of the Arab world's most populous nation. The empty seats where Arab leaders might have sat were among the most eloquent political statements of the late twentieth century.

Ordinary Egyptians, whatever their political views of Sadat's policies, lined the streets of Cairo in large numbers to watch the funeral procession. Egyptian television broadcast the proceedings continuously. The grief was genuine, though mixed with the political ambivalence that had characterized public feeling toward Sadat in his final years.

Mubarak succeeded Sadat as President of Egypt and would remain in power for thirty years, until the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 forced his own resignation.

The Legacy of Anwar Sadat: a Peace That Has Held for Forty Years

The legacy of Anwar Sadat is fundamentally defined by the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979 — an agreement that, as of the time of this writing, has held for more than forty-five years without Egypt and Israel returning to war. This is not a small achievement. In a region where violence and conflict have been constant features of political life, the Egyptian-Israeli peace has proven a durable reality through multiple Israeli governments and multiple Egyptian governments, through wars between Israel and other Arab actors, through the turbulence of the Arab Spring, and through all the vicissitudes of Middle Eastern politics.

The peace has not produced the warm relationship that Sadat dreamed of — Egyptians and Israelis do not vacation in each other's countries in large numbers, and popular feeling in Egypt toward Israel has remained hostile in polls throughout the peace treaty's existence. Egyptian governments have maintained what analysts call a "cold peace" — adhering to the treaty's terms while limiting normalization beyond the minimum required. But the absence of war between Egypt and Israel has been strategically transformative: Israel no longer faces the prospect of fighting Egypt, the Arab world's most populous state, and Egypt has been able to devote its energies to domestic development rather than military confrontation.

For Egypt, the legacy of Sadat's peace is complicated. The Sinai was recovered — Sadat's primary strategic goal was achieved. The United States became Egypt's primary external patron, providing billions of dollars annually in military and economic assistance that continues to this day. But the Palestinian question — the issue that Sadat had made central to his vision of comprehensive peace — remained unresolved and continues to generate regional instability, suffering, and moral pressure on Egypt's accommodation with Israel.

Sadat's domestic legacy is deeply contested. The infitah policy, while introducing economic dynamism, also introduced inequality, corruption, and social tensions that Egypt continues to struggle with. The September 1981 arrests stand as a reminder that Sadat's commitment to political freedom was conditional and ultimately insufficient. The Islamist opposition that he tried to crush — and that ultimately killed him — has remained a powerful force in Egyptian political life ever since.

The most honest assessment of Anwar Sadat is that he was a man of extraordinary personal courage who took risks that no other leader in the Arab world had the vision or the nerve to take, achieved his primary strategic objective, and paid the ultimate price for his decisions. Whether history ultimately judges him a hero or a traitor depends heavily on which values and which communities one privileges in the assessment. For those who value peace and the survival of states, he is a hero. For those who measure success by the resolution of the Palestinian question, the verdict is more complicated. For Egyptian Islamic Jihad and those who share its views, he was a martyr of their own kind — the man whose death they believed was religiously justified, whose killing they hoped would transform Egypt and whose assassination instead produced thirty years of Hosni Mubarak.

He was buried on the grounds of the Unknown Soldier memorial in Cairo, near the reviewing stand where he was killed. The tomb is visited by foreign dignitaries and students of history. Egypt's capital remembers him now with a mixture of official honor and popular ambivalence, as a man who changed his country and his region — not entirely in the ways he intended, but decisively, irrevocably, and in ways that the Middle East will be living with for generations.

Sources

https://www.countryreports.org https://www.wilsoncenter.org https://www.archives.gov https://millercenter.org https://www.un.org/en/sc/repertoire https://www.loc.gov https://history.state.gov https://www.nobelprize.org https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu https://www.jstor.org/stable/2537037 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics https://ahram.org.eg https://digitallibrary.un.org

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