Anwar Sadat

Anwar Sadat led Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981, and in that decade turned the country from war with Israel to peace with it. He launched the 1973 war that restored Egyptian pride, then travelled to Jerusalem and signed the first peace treaty between an Arab state and Israel, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The treaty won back the Sinai Peninsula but cost Egypt its place in the Arab League for a decade, and it helped motivate the Islamist militants who killed him.

Muhammad Anwar es-Sadat was born on 25 December 1918 in the village of Mit Abu El Kom in Monufia, one of a large and poor family; his mother was of partly Sudanese descent. After graduating from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 he was posted to Sudan, where he met Gamal Abdel Nasser and other young officers who wanted to end British domination of Egypt. During the Second World War, as a member of the ultranationalist Young Egypt movement, he plotted with German agents against the British and was arrested and jailed for much of the war. After the war he was imprisoned again in connection with the assassination of the pro-British minister Amin Osman in 1946.

Sadat was one of the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk on 23 July 1952, and he read the first announcement of the revolution on the radio. Under Nasser he held a series of loyal but secondary posts: minister of state, newspaper editor, speaker of the National Assembly from 1960 to 1968, and twice vice-president. When Nasser died in 1970, his inner circle backed Sadat as a seemingly pliable successor.

Sadat proved more capable than expected. On 15 May 1971 he launched what he called the Corrective Revolution, arresting the powerful Nasserists around Vice-President Ali Sabri. He curbed the secret police, expelled Soviet military personnel and rebuilt the army. On 6 October 1973, together with Hafez al-Assad of Syria, he launched a surprise attack on the Israeli forces that had held Sinai since the Six-Day War. Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and broke through the Bar Lev Line, a feat that made him the "Hero of the Crossing". Israel counter-attacked across the canal and encircled an Egyptian army before ceasefires ended the Yom Kippur War, but Egypt had regained its standing.

At home Sadat moved away from Nasser's state-led socialism. His Infitah, or "opening", policy of 1974 welcomed foreign and private investment, and he turned from the Soviet Union towards the United States. When the government lifted price controls on bread and other staples in January 1977, riots broke out and the subsidies were restored.

In 1977 Sadat became the first Arab leader to make an official visit to Israel, addressing the Knesset in Jerusalem. Talks with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, brokered by US president Jimmy Carter, produced the Camp David Accords and then a peace treaty signed in Washington on 26 March 1979. Egypt recognised Israel, and Israel agreed to withdraw from Sinai, which it completed, apart from Taba, in April 1982. Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Most of the Arab world saw the treaty as a betrayal of the Palestinians and Arab unity; the Arab League suspended Egypt and moved its headquarters to Tunis.

Opposition grew in Sadat's last years. In September 1981 he ordered the arrest of more than 1,500 people, from Islamist militants to the Coptic pope and secular intellectuals. On 6 October 1981, during the parade marking the 1973 canal crossing, soldiers led by Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli of an Islamist cell opened fire on the reviewing stand, killing Sadat and eleven others. Al-Islambuli and four others were executed in 1982. Sadat was succeeded by his vice-president, Hosni Mubarak, and the peace treaty with Israel has endured.

Our 1960 map shows Egypt in the Nasser years, and the 1985 map shows it after the return of Sinai under the treaty Sadat signed.