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.