In opening this chapter, Kissinger states that Anwar Sadat has tragically been forgotten, first within his own country and then in the wider world, and thus his contribution to the politics of the Middle East has gone unacknowledged. Kissinger says that this is probably because he “transcended ideologies that, for decades, had contorted the Middle East” offering in their place a bold vision for peace and national sovereignty that found little purchase among a generation of Arab nationalists and their Islamist successors (207). Egypt has long served as a meeting point between the West and the Islamic world, incorporating aspects of both into its politics and culture.

Kissinger describes how, when Sadat was born in 1918, the year World War I ended, Egypt had passed from several centuries under Ottoman rule to a de facto colony under Britain and France. Part of a large family who moved from the village to Cairo as Egypt modernized, he (along with many of his generation) came to resent Western (especially British) dominion, and during World War II he was arrested for trying to make contact with German forces in North Africa. He left prison for good in 1948, just as Egypt suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the newly declared State of Israel.