by Kim Ghattas
Everyone had their favorite actress. There were the adoring fans of Baroudi, prolific with a vast repertoire; there was Egypt’s Cinderella, Soad Hosny, with her lustrous auburn hair and disco dance moves; others preferred the daring Madiha Kamel, who could undulate à la Marilyn Monroe. She played the role of a spy in France in a 1978 movie that included a scene showing her in a demure but clearly amorous embrace in bed with another woman. Then there was Faten Hamama, the classy doyenne who had started acting in 1939, at the age of seven, encouraged by her mathematician father. She was elegant and soft-spoken and gave interviews in perfect French. She was something of an ingénue, but she had political opinions and she believed in her role as an agent of social change and in movies as social critique. She was always pushing the boundaries in a traditional society that was slowly opening up.
In 1975, Hamama had played the role of Doria, a woman seeking a divorce from her abusive husband—a difficult proposition in Egypt, which at the time afforded only men the right to ask for a divorce. I Want a Solution, one of the gems of Egyptian cinema, was selected as the country’s entry for an Academy Award, provoking a discussion about the status of women in Egypt. By early 1979, with much prodding from First Lady Jehane Sadat, the president issued a decree amending the personal status law: women could now demand and be granted a divorce in certain cases. The period was not free of censorship, and a lot of the progressive, secular art was also the result of state support and funding. Nasser even cultivated Umm Kulthum as an asset to the state, and some of her songs lauded the nation.
Egypt’s women were pioneers, the leading lights of Arab feminism, which carved a space for itself within a conservative society, not outside of it. They founded the region’s first feminist union in 1923 and started national newspapers, like the actress and journalist Rose al-Youssef and her eponymous publication in 1925; they were filmmakers like Aziza Amir, who produced Leila in 1927, the first long feature film in Egypt. In the late 1970s, women were rising in the workforce and held senior positions in ministries.
Amir, Hamama, Baroudi, filmmakers, feminism, the right to divorce, working women—it was all a parallel universe, almost a different country from the one Nageh inhabited. University campuses had always been hotbeds of activism in Egypt, keeping up with the movements of their time: liberalism, anticolonialism, nationalism, or socialism. Now it was Islamism. Nageh and his friends pursued their goal of an Islamic society on campus relentlessly. They began to demand segregation wherever they could, imposed prayer time before classes, stopped music classes, organized public prayers on Friday on university campuses. They were a slowly growing force, filling a void left by the shrinking left and the Muslim Brotherhood, which Nasser had banned in 1954. The Brothers had been rounded up or exiled; most had gone to Saudi Arabia. But in the 1970s, students from the Islamic Group and other Islamists had found an unexpected ally in President Sadat, who gave them almost free rein.
After Nasser had died of a heart attack in 1970, Sadat, his vice president, stepped in as acting president. He was supposed to hold the position for only sixty days but lasted longer than anyone expected. As he solidified his power, his every move seemed driven by the obsession to step out of Nasser’s gigantic shadow. Sadat was the focus of many jokes at the beginning of his time in power.
Sadat’s presidential limousine stops at a traffic light.
Sadat asks the driver: And here, which way did Nasser turn?
The driver answers: To the left, Mr. President.
Sadat instructs his driver to signal left and then turn right.
Others described Sadat as walking in Nasser’s footsteps, but with an eraser. Nasser had rid the country of the monarchy and the colonial powers. He nationalized the economy. Sadat would usher in what he called infitah, economic openness. He loosened the rules, liberalized the economy, and encouraged private and foreign investment. Where Nasser exhorted his countrymen to join together to build up the country, Sadat encouraged the migration of Egyptians to neighboring countries, especially the oil-rich Gulf, to send home remittances. Nasser was a reluctant warrior. Sadat took the Israelis by surprise and launched a war to snatch the Sinai back in October 1973. He didn’t win, but the initial success of the attack restored some national pride.
But the titanic shift that truly altered the geopolitics of the Middle East at the height of the Cold War was Sadat’s decision to make friends with America. Sadat believed that Nasser had bankrupted Egypt by being a Soviet ally and turning his back on the West. Even worse, Soviet backing had not helped deliver victory against Israel. Sadat was convinced that only America could help regain lost Arab land. Ties with the United States, broken off after the Six-Day War, were restored on November 7, 1973, barely two weeks after the cease-fire with the Israelis. Sadat hosted the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in Cairo and began calling him “my friend Kissinger.” There were rumblings in the pro-Soviet, anti-imperial camp that included Syria, Iraq, and Libya.
Sadat was making smaller adjustments that were just as significant as his rapprochement with America. He was surrounded by a staunchly Nasserist bureaucracy. He was not the orator that his predecessor had been, but he was ruling at a time when the country needed direction and a sense of purpose. He believed religion would provide an answer to both of those problems. Sadat conducted a purge of Nasserists not only by removing some of them but also by unleashing against them what he believed was the benign force of Islamism, including Salafists. And he molded himself into the “Believer President,” encouraging public displays of piety and making sure pictures were taken of him at Friday prayers. Nasser’s speeches had started with a grandiose Ayyuha al muwatinun, O my fellow citizens; Sadat now began his addresses with Bismillah al Rahman al Raheem, In the name of God the most Beneficent the most Merciful. In a nation that felt adrift amid economic upheaval and geopolitical shifts, religion was a tool to help shore up Sadat’s own legitimacy.
He was not putting on an act. The president was in fact pious, as was his wife, Jehane. Sadat prayed and fasted; he had a Swiss watch with a compass pointing in the direction of Mecca. He was a village boy who had studied with a kuttab, a tutor in traditional village schools focused on teaching the Quran, and he knew all the verses of the Muslim holy book. He recited them in a recording to be left for his children and grandchildren—the word of God, spoken by Sadat.
But he was inadvertently planting the seeds for a trend that would long outlast him. Egypt’s transformation was a prime example of how local dynamics would become exacerbated and magnified by the Iranian Revolution. Sadat was altering the fine balance between private piety and public policy, injecting religion into politics. In September 1971, he had already amended the constitution by making the shari’a a source of legislation. In 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution, he would make it “the principal” source of legislation—a change no future leader would ever dare undo, for fear of being branded an enemy of Islam. And during the decade in between, Sadat unthinkingly assisted and enabled a new generation of activist Islamists, some of whom would later embrace violence.
Although Sadat had not allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to reconstitute as a group legally, he had relaxed restrictions, allowing their publication Al-Da’wa to circulate again, and going as far as releasing some of them from prison. But the Brothers were not the power they once were, and a younger, more impatient, and more militant generation of Islamists was spinning off from their legacy. This was the terrain that Nageh’s group, the Gama’a, was reclaiming. The president wanted to rid university campuses, hotbeds of activism, of all traces of Nasser and all possible challenges to his rule. In the name of democracy, he allowed Islamist groupings to run in student elections—with heavy support from the security services.
By the end of 1979, just as Khomeini was imposing his wilayat al-faqih on Iran, the Gama’a had won control of student unions in most of the big universities across the country, from Alexandria to Asyut. The Islamists had been proselytizing heavily on ca
mpuses, keen to eradicate the sinful secularism of socialists and communists. They were well organized and provided services for newcomers to the big city. At a time of great migration and urbanization in Egypt and across the Arab world, the rural-urban tension provided a soft spot that Islamists everywhere were able to exploit. In Egypt, they targeted lower-class and lower-middle-class students, children of middle- or low-ranking bureaucrats who had moved from villages and small towns to big cities where they had no family or relatives. The Gama’a offered a new tribe and a sense of belonging in the city, a soft landing. Many of the Gama’a cadres, like Nageh’s, were high-achieving students in the medical and engineering departments. Many of those who were joining and would become leading names of the Islamist movement had started out as young socialists and Nasserists. They were young, disillusioned, and looking for direction. The Gama’a provided similar ideals—patriotism, loyalty to Palestine, belief in the armed struggle against Israel—in a new, appealing packaging that included discipline, prayer, and the promise of salvation thrown in. Seemingly overnight, socialist summer camps were renamed after Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first caliph after the prophet. Across the Middle East, the left in its various shades—progressive, secular, socialist, nationalist—was being beaten into oblivion. In Egypt, it dissolved into thin air. New generations of Arabs would grow up without the chaotic but fertile plethora of political parties and ideologies that had enriched the minds of their parents. The choice was now dictatorship or Islam, or worse: the dictatorship of Islam. Sadat thought he was using the Islamists, but in fact they were using him, and he was accumulating the mistakes, feeding their rage.
He was obsessed with getting back the Sinai. He had tried war; it didn’t work. He would then try peace. The man everyone had underestimated as Nasser’s shadow was proving himself a daring leader who could make brash decisions and theatrical moves. No one knows for sure when and how the idea of traveling to Israel first came to him. There had been secret diplomatic contacts with the Israelis in September 1977, but such an approach to peace would be slow. Sadat opted to take the enemy by surprise. On November 9, 1977, during an address to the Egyptian parliament, he launched a trial ballon: “I will go the ends of the earth for peace, even to the Knesset itself.” He found a willing partner on the other side: Menachim Begin, the country’s first-ever prime minister from the right-wing Likud party. The hawk felt he could risk peace overtures. On November 18, 1977, Sadat flew to Tel Aviv. More than two thousand journalists were covering the visit, and the world was transfixed. On the tarmac, an Israeli army officer saluted the Egyptian leader. Sadat then inspected the guard of honor of the Israeli Defense Forces. In Jerusalem, he spoke at the Knesset. Israeli army radio played Umm Kulthum. Arafat was furious.
Egyptians were initially euphoric. The welcome reception Sadat got in Cairo after his two-day visit to enemy territory was rapturous—much of it perhaps organized by the state, but it didn’t matter. There was deep relief that true peace might be in sight, for a country exhausted by repeated wars. “Sadat, Sadat! The man of peace!” chanted Cairenes, as Sadat drove through the city in an open-top limousine.
But across the Arab world and beyond, rage had quickly replaced the initial incredulity. There were protests on the streets of Beirut; the Egyptian embassies came under attack in Tripoli and in Athens. Newspapers in Iraq and Syria declared it the “trip of treachery and shame,” denouncing Sadat for destroying Arab unity and unilaterally recognizing the “Zionist entity.” Lebanon’s leftist As-Safir newspaper highlighted Sadat’s isolation in the Arab world and called on Syria, Libya, and the PLO to close ranks against Israel and Sadat. This was the moment when Arafat had first connected with Khomeini, thanks to his cleric friend Hani Fahs. The Saudis were irritated but kept their distance—they neither denounced nor applauded, but secretly King Khaled had prayed that Sadat’s plane would crash on the way to Tel Aviv.
When Sadat launched peace talks with Israel in 1978, Syria and the PLO began to clamor to eject Egypt from the Arab League, even pushing for sanctions. The Saudis were privately supportive of Sadat’s efforts but publicly silent, waiting to see whether the Egyptian negotiations would also deliver for the Palestinians and the rest of the region. They shielded Sadat from diplomatic retribution and took out their checkbooks to provide billions of dollars to silence the dissenters: Jordan, Syria, and the PLO, the Arabs with land occupied by Israel. When Sadat signed his bilateral peace treaty with the Israelis on the White House lawn, on March 26, 1979, he had recovered the Sinai, but he had also made concessions, including acquiescing to full diplomatic relations with Israel. The peace treaty with Israel made no mention of the Palestinians: it was a purely bilateral, and a very final, accord. And although there was a side letter about Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with no discussion of Jerusalem, the Palestinians, and especially Arafat, felt betrayed. These discussions had taken place without them, and they didn’t want to settle for autonomy, they wanted statehood. Sadat had irrevocably shattered the united Arab front in the face of Israel, and had chosen a bad time to do so. Immersed in his pursuit of peace, Sadat had failed to recognize how the region around him had changed since his trip to Jerusalem. Khomeini was now in Tehran, and Arafat had a new best friend.
On March 31, a few days after Sadat had signed the peace treaty, Arafat arrived in Baghdad to attend the Arab League summit, fresh off his victory lap in Tehran and ready to lead the charge against Sadat with other hardliners, like Syria’s Assad. He publicly predicted Sadat would be assassinated. He demanded that Arab countries cut all diplomatic and economic ties with Cairo. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Saud al-Faisal rejected it as “empty out-bidding, slogans and rhetoric.” The talks went on for three tense days. The dispute between the PLO and the Saudis flared into the open, until one evening Arafat walked out of the session. Saudi Arabia was being shown up as weak and too compromising. Unable to sway the hardliners, Saudi Arabia had to join them: Arab countries cut ties with Egypt, ejecting it from the Arab League and moving the league’s headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. Not to be outdone, a month later, Khomeini also cut diplomatic ties with Egypt. Sadat found himself isolated in the region but seemed to care little. He dismissed the leaders of Gulf monarchies as a small clique with no cultural, economic, or political relevance. And he mocked Khomeini as a lunatic madman who had “turned Islam into a mockery,” an impostor who he predicted would soon be overthrown in a coup.
When Saudi Arabia looked to Egypt, it saw a regional rival with whom it sparred and had fought in the past but that was essentially in its camp of moderates. But when Khomeini looked at Egypt, he saw a country ripe for an Islamic revolution. On the streets of Tehran came calls for the death of Sadat. Parallels were drawn between the shah and Sadat, as well as between the two countries, economically and politically. And in the early days of the revolution, before the American hostage crisis, Yazdi had described the Iranian Revolution as an inspiration for other countries, including Pakistan or even Saudi Arabia. “The success of the Islamic revolution has shown our Arab neighbors that Islam provides the ideological basis for change … All Islamic movements that were dormant or apologetic in their approach will come out in the open in the Arab and Muslim world.” Khomeini went further in an interview with the US media: “I demand that the Egyptian people try to overthrow [Sadat] just as we did the shah.”
The parallels between Sadat and the shah were indeed many: Westernized, with progressive first ladies, cornerstones of American strategy in the region, friends of Israel, imperial, and authoritarian. The more Sadat Westernized his country, as the shah had done with his, the more fundamentalism spread, as it had in Iran. However, unlike the shah, Sadat never turned his back on the clerical establishment or religion itself. Sadat kept insisting, in public and in private, that his country was not Iran, that there would be no Khomeini in Egypt. All the while, he was starting to believe there was a conspiracy against him. The comparison became even harder to deny when the shah arri
ved in Egypt on March 25, 1980, seeking haven and medical attention, and the two men stood side by side at the airport. Sadat, invoking Arab hospitality and loyalty to the man who had been a good friend, offered him permanent asylum. There were protests everywhere, from Cairo to Asyut. At Asyut University, Nageh helped organize the largest protest Egypt had seen in recent memory—certainly the largest by Islamist forces. More than twelve thousand people descended onto the streets, protesting the arrival of the Iranian monarch. There were clashes and one protester died. In Nageh’s mind, it felt like a turning point, like the first spark of a bigger confrontation to come. The shah’s stay was short—he died a few months later and was buried in Cairo with great pomp. But the damage to Sadat was done.
For many Egyptians, removed from the gruesome details marring the birth of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian Revolution had been the stuff of dreams. Leftists saw only the power of the masses bringing down a tyrant—like the one oppressing them—as well as a new era of social justice. Inspired by what they saw unfold in Iran, some Egyptian women put on the veil to signal rejection of their own Westernizing ruler. Nageh and his friends saw the ultimate victory of Islam and a country that was now on the righteous path, a model Islamic society. Khomeini had shown that the future did not have to be a secular, Westernized society; it did not have to include friends of America like the shah. Or Sadat.
