Anwar al-Sadat: On the 39th Anniversary of his Assassination

                                             

Anwar al-Sadat: the perplexing President.  My evaluation of the late President Sadat is complex. Here I shall focus on two subjects alone: (1) returning Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty, and (2) the Islamization of the Egyptian collective mindset.

Sadat's approach to end the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula was achieved through the use of military force followed thereafter through negotiations. If politics is the art of the impossible, Sadat must be given above 90% on these two stages: the stage of war and the stage of negotiations. On 6th October, 1973, Sadat had the courage to launch a difficult war against a much stronger army, i.e. the Israel Defense Forces.  It was a war in which his army did well during its first half, yet also a war without which the negotiations stage would have been morally impossible.  Accomplishing what he could via war, then completing the mission of recovering his occupied territories via negotiations produced the best possible outcome. Having said this about Sadat's enormous success in returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty, I am afraid that what I will write about Sadat and the Islamization of the Egyptian collective mindset shall not be less than extremely critical and most negative.

Sadat was intellectually an Islamist to a certain degree. He loved to describe himself as a Muslim president of a Muslim country. His tendency to start and conclude his speeches with Quranic verses was an obvious and unprecedented phenomenon in modern Egypt's political life. In parallel, he was hugely influenced by both the Saudi monarch King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and even more so by his close friend Kamal Adham, who was the top man in the Saudi Intelligence at the time and brother-in-law of King Faisal. The two Saudis wanted to redirect Egypt from being pro Moscow into adopting a pro Washington DC stance.

At that time, Islamism was taken for granted as a main component of the anti Soviet Union package. Sadat was clearly very much pro Saudi Arabia. He significantly increased the Islamic tone of his speeches while employing a large number of Islamic/Islamist clerics who had departed Egypt during Nasser's era and gone to Saudi Arabia. One of them would play a gigantic role in the sought after project of Islamizing the overall cultural environment in Egypt. This cleric was Shaykh Muhammad Metwalli Al-Sha'raawi.

When I mentioned these observations to Mrs. Jihan al-Sadat over dinner with her in London a few years ago after her speech at the British Parliament, she commented with the following words: during his last year, Anwar (al-Sadat) repeatedly said to me that his policy of using the Muslim Brothers was a huge mistake. That night, Mrs. Sadat looked at me and said: it was a mistake that cost him his life. My comment was a such: this is absolutely correct.

It is this policy that led to the assassination of President Sadat by a group of Islamists on 6th October, 1981. But this very sad incident was not the end of this policy, as Egypt and Egyptians have been suffering over the four decades since from the consequences of bringing about this plague into Egypt, with the assistance of the King of Saudi Arabia and his Intelligence Department. In actuality, Sadat's policy drastically changed the collective mindset of millions of Egyptians from belonging to a Mediterranean Sea culture to the Nomadic Mindset of the inner part of the Arabian Peninsula that produced Wahhabism some 276 years ago!