In the 1970s, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat ascended into history by shattering Egypt’s former revolutionary posture in the Middle East—a bold pivot that leftist ideologues instantly dismissed as a sellout to “imperialist” forces and a betrayal of Arab revolutionary modernity they had fetishized for decades. In truth, Sadat’s gamble marked a necessary disentanglement from the suffocating myths of pan-Arab revolution and anti-Western bombast. Rather than entrenching Egypt further in a dead-end war economy and moralistic sloganeering, he chose to steer the nation into a reality-based world order, one grounded in pragmatic international relations and liberated from the barren rhetoric of socialist utopianism.
While Western academics like Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson continued insisting on the superiority of the Soviet economic model, Sadat—like the Chinese leadership—recognized it for the fiasco it was.
At the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death, Egypt found itself depleted and disheartened: the military was broken, the government machinery bloated, and the economy paralyzed by a wartime socialism that no longer served its people—particularly the swelling generation of educated Egyptians with nowhere to apply their skills. Worse still, many of the same pro-Soviet elites who claimed to champion the “masses” revealed themselves to be corrupt opportunists more interested in preserving their own positions than in advancing any genuine national renaissance.
Sadat, though burdened by youthful dalliances that had veered into extremist and even Nazi sympathies, proved far more nimble in discarding ideological baggage than his lionized predecessor. In 1971, he underscored a decisive break from Nasser’s grand illusions by renaming the country the Arab Republic of Egypt—an unsubtle rejection of pan-Arab daydreams masquerading as policy. He systematically purged Soviet infiltrators from the state apparatus and quietly repurposed national resources, shifting Egypt onto a track no longer beholden to dogmatic socialism. Contrary to myths, Sadat’s transformation was not some epic spiritual epiphany, but rather the commonsense realization that sloganeering about “anti-imperialism” accomplished nothing against grim economic realities. He understood that if tiny Israel, bolstered by Western alliances, could outperform a much larger Arab bloc, then the Western model was plainly more viable than any bankrupt, Soviet-style enterprise.
What truly rankled the anti-imperialist left was Sadat’s dismissal of the very foundations of their worldview. While Western academics like Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson continued insisting on the superiority of the Soviet economic model, Sadat—like the Chinese leadership—recognized it for the fiasco it was. In short, he was no ideologue. His interest in ideas never went beyond their tangible payoff for Egypt’s national power and prosperity. Casting off the broken crutch of an “anti-imperialist” consensus, he set Egypt on a path that audaciously pursued Western partnerships and market-driven reforms, flouting the militant dogma that had mired the country in stagnation. If this meant angering the self-appointed guardians of Arab “revolution,” then so be it: Sadat, in his unsentimental pragmatism, wagered that Egypt’s future depended on busting free from ideological straitjackets—regardless of who howled in protest.
Seeking to retain power on multiple fronts, Sadat doubled down on projecting an Islamic identity, emboldening Islamist groups to reshape public life at the expense of the Christian minority.
In the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War—largely staged to force Washington’s hand into brokering a deal that would salvage Egypt’s standing—Sadat seized the moment to usher his nation onto a capitalist developmental path. He envisioned an Egypt open to global markets, tolerant of traditional religion, and receptive to cultural exchange, a vision that the entrenched Arab Left saw as a cataclysmic betrayal. Across the Arab world, leftist intellectual and cultural institutions recoiled, denouncing Sadat’s departure from the Marxist fold as a capitulation to American imperial designs. Even within Egypt itself, the state apparatus—bloated by the ideologues Nasser had installed and nurtured throughout the 1960s—fomented discontent. Government-employed journalists and editors took to their pulpits to churn out propaganda against Sadat’s reforms, effectively turning Egypt into a battlefield of ideas. By the late 1970s, as Sadat moved to finalize the Camp David Accords and pivot Egypt from the Soviet sphere to the American one, this internal campaign reached feverish levels of hysteria. Newspapers and magazines swarmed with allegations that peace with Israel was tantamount to sacrificing the nation’s very soul; anti-Israeli rhetoric became the rallying cry for the entire Arab Left, which clung to the notion that any reconciliation with Israel spelled the demise of their socialist utopia.
Yet amid the uproar, a handful of writers and thinkers found the courage to abandon the old revolutionary gospel. They realized that unending confrontation and hollow anti-Western slogans could not sustain a modern society. Tales From Our Alley (1975) by Naguib Mahfouz epitomizes this turn. Mahfouz spins the tale of a timeworn Cairo neighborhood in which a younger generation, discontented with tradition and the “obstructions” of religious practice, demands the removal of a religious services building to ease access to their cherished “North.” Their rebellion collides with the sensibilities of ordinary townspeople, who fight to preserve a way of life they consider elemental. The ensuing strife nearly consumes the neighborhood in civil war, before an elder figure intervenes to declare, “As long as cemeteries are needed, the building stays.” Mahfouz thereby concedes a fundamental truth: as long as human mortality endures, religion remains inseparable from communal existence. Much as Sadat urged his detractors to seek other routes toward prosperity and to abandon fruitless antagonisms, Mahfouz’s sage advices the young insurgents to pursue their “North” by different means. In doing so, Mahfouz steps away from the self-destructive dream of permanent revolution, mirroring the very realism Sadat championed when he dared to unshackle Egypt from the orthodoxies of socialist dogma.
The irony was thick: while Sadat had bet on a new future, the Left’s cultural icons clung to old illusions of glorious conflict—unmoored from the mundane realities of governance and economics that Egypt so desperately needed to address.
Not all literary figures and state-sponsored intellectuals handled this transition with the equanimity Mahfouz displayed—especially regarding peace with Israel. One of the more vocal dissenters was Lutfi al-Kholi, then editor-in-chief of The Vanguard. Sadat, in a move emblematic of his struggle against the deeply entrenched Arab Left, promptly dismissed al-Kholi, replaced him with a more sympathetic figure, and renamed the journal The New Vanguard. Such maneuvers revealed how few allies Sadat had at his disposal in the cultural arena; the establishment of leftist academics and writers had fortified itself for decades, creating a formidable ideological front. In desperation, Sadat leaned further into religious conservatism, granting wider latitude to the Muslim Brotherhood in a bid to dilute the Left’s cultural dominion. Yet this gambit produced unintended consequences: radical Islamist youth, steeped in a dogmatic fervor of their own, were plotting to ignite an altogether different “Revolution”—one that made even the most militant leftist rhetoric look quaint. Before Sadat realized what was brewing, jihadist cells began attacking Christians, triggering a deep rift between the state and the Coptic Church, which feared losing the secular gains of past decades. Seeking to retain power on multiple fronts, Sadat doubled down on projecting an Islamic identity, emboldening Islamist groups to reshape public life at the expense of the Christian minority. Surrounded by ideological adversaries, Sadat found himself isolated. He could negotiate with the older Islamist elite, whose networks he had known since his own revolutionary youth, but that familiarity did not extend to the new generation of incendiary revolutionaries who, ironically, were proving more extreme than the Marxists he had labored to sideline.
Despite Sadat’s efforts to steer Egypt toward Western alliances and market-driven reforms, the so-called New Left thrived on campuses, absorbing global unrest and blending it with local grievances. Their enclaves, particularly among the well-heeled sons and daughters of the Egyptian bourgeoisie, indulged a theatrical kind of self-loathing—the same phenomenon of middle-class guilt that first flowered in eighteenth-century France. In Egypt’s case, it produced an insurgent youth culture that championed protest above all else. One luminary of this scene was Sheikh Imam, who—with his lyricist Ahmed Fouad Negm—enjoyed iconic status reminiscent of Bob Dylan. In truth, and like Dylan, Imam’s audience was less the rural “folk” he claimed to represent and more the urban, university-based “yuppies” who saw themselves as radical crusaders. Hailed by admirers as a near-prophetic voice destined to eclipse even Shakespeare, Imam diverged sharply from Dylan in one key respect: his songs did not pine for the end of war but rather glorified the perpetuation of struggle.
His first significant political hit, the 1968 anthem “Guevara Is Dead,” channeled the grief and fury following the Arab debacle in 1967. It eulogized the fallen revolutionary icon while castigating the complacent masses—an undisguised homage to the cult of endless revolt:
Guevara is dead,
So are the news.
In the mosques and churches,
In the coffee shops and the bars.
Guevara is dead, and now comes the talk and the chatter.
The ideal man of struggle is dead.
Oh, mourn the loss of the real men.
He died on his canon fighting in the jungles…
What do you say, people of comfort?
Oh, you, imbeciles!
Indulging in your food and fashion
…
It is over.
It is over.
There is no salvation for you,
But with rifles and bullets,
This is the logic of our happy times.
The times of negros and the Americans.
The word is for fire and iron…
There is no alternative,
and there is no escape,
You either prepare the army of salvation,
Or bid our world farewell.
In verses dripping with self-righteous fury, Imam’s lamentation invoked the specter of violent revolution, insisting that only “rifles and bullets” could redeem an Arab world supposedly betrayed by its own comforts. The song distilled the Arab Left’s unshakeable commitment to the mythos of perpetual upheaval, even as Sadat endeavored—however imperfectly—to move Egypt beyond the suffocating grip of doctrinaire ideological battles. Whereas Sadat saw in capitalism and Western alliances a path to pragmatic revival, voices like Imam’s peddled a holy war against an ever-shifting pantheon of enemies, from “negros and the Americans” to the “imbeciles” who refused to see the revolutionary light. The irony was thick: while Sadat had bet on a new future, the Left’s cultural icons clung to old illusions of glorious conflict—unmoored from the mundane realities of governance and economics that Egypt so desperately needed to address.
