Anwar - el - Sādāt

born Dec. 25, 1918, Mit Abū al-Kum, al-Minūfīyah governorate, Egypt

died Oct. 6, 1981, Cairo

in full Muḥammad Anwar el-Sādāt, el-Sādāt also spelled as-Sādāt Egyptian army officer and politician who was president of Egypt from 1970 until his death. He initiated serious peace negotiations with Israel, an achievement for which he shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Under their leadership, Egypt and Israel made peace with each other in 1979.

Sādāt graduated from the Cairo Military Academy in 1938. During World War II he plotted to expel the British from Egypt with the help of the Germans. The British arrested and imprisoned him in 1942, but he later escaped. In 1950 he joined Gamal Abdel Nasser's Free Officers organization; he participated in their armed coup against the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and supported Nasser's election to the presidency in 1956. Sādāt held various high offices that led to his serving in the vice presidency (1964–66, 1969–70). He became acting president upon Nasser's death on Sept. 28, 1970, and was elected president in a plebiscite on October 15. Sādāt's domestic policies included decentralization and diversification of the economy and relaxation of Egypt's political structure.

It was in foreign affairs that Sādāt made his most dramatic efforts. Feeling that the Soviet Union gave him inadequate support in Egypt's continuing confrontation with Israel, he expelled thousands of Soviet technicians and advisers from the country in 1972. The following year he launched, with Syria, a joint invasion of Israel that began the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973. The Egyptian army achieved a tactical surprise in its attack on the Israeli-held Sinai Peninsula, and, though Israel successfully counterattacked, Sādāt came out of the war with greatly enhanced prestige as the first Arab leader to actually retake some territory from Israel.

After the war, Sādāt began to work toward peace in the Middle East. He made a historic visit to Israel (Nov. 19–20, 1977), during which he traveled to Jerusalem to place his plan for a peace settlement before the Knesset (Israeli Parliament). This initiated a series of diplomatic efforts that Sādāt continued despite strong opposition from most of the Arab world and the Soviet Union. The U.S. president Jimmy Carter mediated the negotiations between Sādāt and Begin that resulted in the Camp David Accords (Sept. 17, 1978), a preliminary peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. Sādāt and Begin were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978; and their continued political negotiations resulted in the signing on March 26, 1979, of a treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the first between the latter and any Arab nation.

While Sādāt's popularity rose in the West, it fell dramatically in Egypt because of internal opposition to the treaty, a worsening economic crisis, and Sādāt's suppression of the resulting public dissent. He was assassinated by Muslim extremists while reviewing a military parade commemorating the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973.

Sādāt's autobiography, In Search of Identity, was published in 1978.