Sadat Freed the Muslim Brotherhood. Who Killed Him? | Part 3

History Onion · 2:59

On 6 October 1981 four men in army uniform shot dead Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, at a military parade. They belonged to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, not the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders Sadat had jailed a month earlier. Part 3 goes back to how the two came apart: Sadat freeing the Brothers, the Brotherhood renouncing violence, the men who rejected that — and, in Syria, the war that ended at Hama. Context & numbers: • The releases came in stages from 1971 and were completed by a general amnesty in 1975. The Brotherhood itself was never re-legalised. • Why Sadat freed them: historians including Gilles Kepel and Carrie Wickham say he wanted a counterweight to the Nasserist left; Sadat's own framing was a state of "science and faith". • Egyptian Islamic Jihad was organised around 1979–80 by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, a former Brotherhood member. The assassin, Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambouli, and four others were executed on 15 April 1982. • Sadat and Iran: he gave the deposed Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, asylum on 24 March 1980 and a state funeral in Cairo that July; Islamist students protested the asylum in Cairo and Asyut. Analysts and historians say Iran's 1979 revolution encouraged Egyptian militants to believe a ruler could be overthrown. The assassins' own stated reasons were that Sadat did not rule by Islamic law, the peace with Israel, and the September 1981 arrests. No Iranian role in the killing has been established; afterwards Tehran named a street after the gunman, Khalid al-Islambouli. • September 1981: about 1,500–1,600 people were arrested across the whole opposition — Brotherhood leaders, other Islamists, leftists and journalists — and the Coptic pope, Shenouda III, was banished to a monastery, after two years of sectarian tension.