MY HOPE FOR PEACE

A humane call for peace in the Middle East by the widow of the assassinated Egyptian president.

Anwar Sadat was murdered on October 6, 1981, by what Jehan Sadat (A Woman of Egypt, 1987) calls “Islamic fanatics who believed that the peace he forged with Israel would perish along with him.” They had reason for that belief, since peace has proved elusive—though, the author argues, the 1979 Egypt-Israeli treaty has held. Sadat, who divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Cairo, traces much of the impetus for Islamic fundamentalism to the 1967 war, a humiliating experience for the Arab nations arrayed against Israel—but, in the eyes of some, a sign of God’s disfavor that required a “return to the faith as it was practiced in the Prophet’s day.” The Egyptian victory over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War did nothing to turn the tide of fundamentalism, especially after Anwar Sadat, by his widow’s account, took the occasion to relax tensions and seek an avenue to peaceful coexistence. The fundamentalist war has now widened to include the Western powers, which, notes the author, affords another occasion—for the Islamic faithful to repudiate the extremism of Osama bin Laden and company and “safeguard the ideals that Islam enjoins: compassion, social justice, and tolerance.” In turn, the West must “look beyond the lunatic fringe” by, among other things, rejecting the notion of the “clash of civilizations.” That flawed theory, she argues, presupposes that Islam is monolithic, stagnant and incapable of change. Sadat’s sentiments are wise and welcome, though she recognizes that there are many obstacles toward Western-Islamic and Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, not least of them the status of Jerusalem, which, she writes, must be made “safe and open to all believers.” Sadat argues that people throughout the Middle East want peace; only politicians and puritans do not.

A slender but important contribution to a discourse that needs more champions.