Anwar al-Sadat, in the 39th memory of his assassination.

Anwar al-Sadat : the perplexing President. My evaluation to the late President Sadat is complexed. Here, I shall focuss on two subjects only : (1) Returning Sinai to the Egyptian sovereignty, and (2) the Islamization of the Egyptian Collective Mindset. His way to end the Israeli occupation to the Sinai peninsula was obviously, via doing the best possible by military force and thereafter by negotiations. If politics are the art of possible, Sadat must be given above 90% in the two stages : the stage of war and the stage of negotiations. Sadat had the courage to launch on 6th October, 1973 a difficult war against a much stronger army, i.e. the Israel Defense Forces. A war that his army did better only during its first half. Also, a war without which the negotiations stage would have been morally impossible. Doing what he could via war, then completing the mission of recovering his occupied territories via negotiations were (both) the best possible. Having said all of that about Sadat’s enormous success in returning the Sinai Peninsula to the Egyptian Sovereignty, I am afraid what I will write about Sadat and the Islamization of the Egyptian Collective Mindset shall not be but extremely critical and most negative. Sadat was intellectually an Islamist to a certain degree. He loved to describe himself as a Muslim President to a Muslim country. His tendency to start and conclude his speeches with Quranic verses was an obvious and unprecedented phenomenon in Modern Egypt Political life. In parallel, he was hugely influenced by both the Saudi Monarch King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and much more by his close friend Kamal Adham, who at the time was the top man in the Saudi Intelligence and a brother-in-law to King Faisal. The two Saudis wanted to redirect Egypt from pro Moscow to be pro Washington DC. At that time, Islamism was taken for granted as a main component of the anti Soviet Union package. Sadat was patently clear a pro Saudi Arabia person. He significantly increased the Islamic tune in his speeches and meanwhile employed a large number of Islamic/Islamist clerics who left Egypt during Nasser’s era to Saudi Arabia. One of these would play a gigantic role in the sought project of Islamizing the overall cultural environment in Egypt. This cleric was Shaykh Muhammad Metwalli Al-Sha raawi. When I mentioned all this analogy to Mrs. Jihan al-Sadat over dinner with her in London a few years ago and 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 the following : it was a mistake that cost him his life. My comment was as such : this is absolutely correct. It is a policy that led to President Sadat assassination 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 for four decades from the consequences of bringing about this Plague into Egypt some fifty years ago with the assistance of the King of Saudi Arabia and his Intelligence Department. Actually, this Sadat’s policy changed drastically the Collective Mindset of millions of Egyptians from
belonging to the Mediterranean Sea culture to the Nomadic Mindset of the inner part of the Arabian peninsula that produced Wahhabism some 276 years ago !

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