Anwar Sadat Biography

Anwar Sadat was born on December 25th, 1918 in al-Minufiyah, Egypt. He was born into
a poor family, and was one of 13 siblings. His father was an upper Egyptian and his mother was
Sudanese. Because of his heritage he faced insults for "not looking Egyptian enough." During his
early childhood he was under the care of his grandmother, who told him stories of the resistance
of British occupation. Stories like these cemented his feeling of Egyptian nationalism. He
graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 and was appointed to the Signal
Corps. He was posted in Sudan where he met Gamal Nasser, and along with a couple other junior
officers they formed the secret Free Officers, an organization dedicated to freeing Egypt and
Sudan from British domination and royal corruption.
During WW2 he was imprisoned by the British for attempting to obtain help from the
Axis in expelling the occupying British forces. Along with the Free Officers organization, Sadat
participated in launching the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 which overthrew King Farouk on July
23rd of 1952. Sadat then announced the news of the revolution to the Egyptian people over the
radio. In 1954, during the presidency of Nasser, Sadat was appointed minister of State. In 1959
he became the Secretary of the National Union. Sadat was also appointed as the Vice President.
After Nasser's death, Sadat became the 3rd Egyptian president. Three years into the war of
attrition in the Suez Canal zone, Sadat endorsed a letter of peace but it failed as neither America
nor Israel accepted the terms. In 1973 he attempted to militarily take back the Sinai Peninsula.
They were however pushed back and defeated. In terms of economic freedoms and economics,
Sadat introduced greater political freedom and a new economic policy. He relaxed government
controls and promoted private investment. Sadat shifted Egypt from a policy of confrontation
with Israel, to one of peaceful accommodation through negotiations. In 1979 he signed a peace
treaty with Israel, through which Egypt regained the Sinai in 1983.
In his eleven years as president, he changed Egypt's trajectory, departing from many of
the political, and economic tenets of Nasserism, re-instituting a multi-party system, and
launching the Infitah economic policy. As President, he led Egypt in the October War of 1973 to
regain Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967,
making him a hero in Egypt and, for a time, the wider Arab World. Afterwards, he engaged in
negotiations with Israel, culminating in the EgyptIsrael Peace Treaty; this won him and Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin the Nobel Peace Prize.