Brace for Impact - Part II
Of all the countries of the Middle East, save perhaps Israel for its obvious importance in Judeo-Christian tradition, the place that holds the imagination of the West most is Egypt. It is the fabled home of Cleopatra and her doomed romance that brought down the Roman Republic; it is the mysterious desert land of sphinxes, pharaohs and pyramids that so fascinated European explorers, artists and politicians for decades; and, perhaps most germanely to the geopolitical environment of late 1981, it was the first country of the "third world," so to speak, that stood up to Western military and economic might under Gamel Abdel Nasser in the Suez Crisis of 1956, nearly triggering a global war and signaling definitively that the Age of Empire was over, that it was time for Britain in particular to retreat back to her island and that a strange new age was upon the world. Egypt had seemed to be at the center of two of the other most important intrigues of the last decade, those of the 1973 Yom Kippur War which broke the mythos of an invincible, impregnable Israel in the Sinai and led to the epoch-defining Arab oil embargo, and then suddenly six years later the signing of the Rose Garden Treaty, a mutual recognition of peace with Israel that brought Egypt into the Western camp more or less permanently from then on and arguably the greatest achievement of President Gerald Ford's full term in office.
Central to both of these events was the curious figure of Mohammed Anwar Sadat, who upon replacing Nasser as President in October of 1970 had stunned Egypt and indeed the world by making his presence felt not as the near-anonymous puppet vice president he had been viewed as but rather as a force in his own right, ending Nasserism both as a socialistic, Arab nationalist mission and indeed as the centerpiece of Egyptian and indeed Arab foreign policy. He had purged the government of the Nasserists who had once hoped to manipulate him, steered Egypt towards a close alliance with Iran (he was particularly close to Shah Mohammed Reza and traveled to Pakistan for his funeral) and reformed the Egyptian military so it could carry out its remarkable achievements in the Yom Kippur War but then also sought out peace with Israel, which enraged the Arab world and drove Egypt out of the brotherhood of the Arab League but into the eager arms of a generous West which rewarded Egypt with money and investment both in military kit but also economic support, important in the high-inflation and volatile late 1970s. Sadat had maneuvered through the shock of peace with the once-eternal foe of Israel by rewarding Islamist and Coptic figures with support to build a separate political base; Egypt had ditched left-wing, secular, pro-Soviet Arab nationalism from the age of Nasser for a socially conservative but pro-Western and developmentalist Egyptian nationalism.
That was not to say that Sadat's accommodation with Israel was popular with all Islamists, because it most certainly wasn't, and the decision had destabilized Egypt. Sadat took the view that Soviet-backed hatchet men such as Hafez al-Assad in former ally Syria and longstanding Libyan crackpot Muammar al-Gaddafi were behind much of the internal unrest that plagued Egypt in the early 1980s, but Islamist officials and military figures opposed to Sadat were a big part of it, too. Matters came to a head in June 1981, when a failed coup was put down and followed by a mass crackdown that included the shuttering of independent press and mass arrests which only served to make Sadat more unpopular, culminating in a botched assassination attempt on him on October 6, 1981, in which an Islamist sleeper agent in the Army, Khalid Islambouli, fired his machine gun at Sadat's grandstand during the annual victory parade. Sadat was badly wounded, losing his right hand, and his Vice President, General Hosni Mubarak, was killed;
[1] also killed that day was the Cuban ambassador and James Tully, the Irish Minister of Defense, shocking both of those foreign lands.
The Muslim Brotherhood, while not directly responsible for the attack, had long been a thorn in the side of Sadat's government as an independent power structure in Egypt, the country of their founding - no more. Upon his leaving the hospital on October 10, 1981, Sadat stood up before a small nest of microphones, held up the bandaged stump where his right hand had been, and declared, "Allah has graced me by sparing my life; Allah forgive me, but I cannot be as gracious as He towards those who have attempted to destroy Egypt!"
[2] What followed throughout the autumn of 1981 stunned Egypt and indeed much of the Arab world, as Sadat carried out one of the most ruthless purges of political opponents in any country since Stalin. After torturing as much information out of the attempted assassins led by Islambouli as possible, the captured cell of soldiers were publicly executed by hanging. Figures attached to two groups of potential perpetrators, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, were next on the list. Those already in prison found themselves facing firing squads in courtyards; those who weren't were assassinated by death squads or simply disappeared. Prominent Islamic polemicists like Aywan al-Zawahiri and Tala'at Qasim were murdered in their homes, while the infamous "Blind Sheikh," Omer Abdel-Rahman
[3] who had allegedly given a
fatwa to the killers for Sadat's murder, was publicly executed just to make a point. Even more moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood were given life sentences, tortured and murdered in an orgy of death that lasted deep into 1983 and left organized Islamist opposition to Sadat within Egypt a husk.
It was not only Islamists who found themselves on the chopping block, however; many of the military opponents of Sadat who had attempted to overthrow him in June of 1981 were declared traitors and shot, and prominent Nasserist critics of the regime were arrested and publicly tried. The hope in the West of an open, free and progressive Arab superpower in Egypt had in the space of a year been utterly dashed, but also left Sadat stronger than ever and, conveniently, still very much in the pro-Western camp. The speed, breadth and ferocity of his purge in the wake of his survival had left observers slack-jawed and Iranian SAVAK agents kicking themselves that they had not pulled something like that off themselves; Egyptian "advisors" in Iran became a coming occurrence through the rest of the 1980s to help "steer" Iran's nascent but very much controlled democracy.
Most crucially, an angry Sadat ready to take his pound of flesh off any enemy rather than conciliate was an important wild card as storm clouds started to gather over the Middle East; he was friendly with Israel and Iran, hostile to pro-Soviet states like Syria, Iraq and Libya, and detested Islamists such as the ultra-fundamentalists who were increasingly bringing the viability of Saudi Arabia into question. In other words, he was a ruthless bastard, but exactly the ruthless bastard the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and Iran needed...
[1] Everything up to now is more or less OTL; however, here it is Sadat who is shot in the hand, and Mubarak who dies.
[2] Any Muslim readers are welcome to correct me if this flies dangerously close to blasphemy and would thus be extremely unlikely for a Muslim leader to publicly declare on TV
[3] Zawahiri of course needs no introduction, while Omer Abdel-Rahman was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing