Anwar El Sadat was the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981. In his eleven year reign, President Anwar El Sadat made sweeping changes that fundamentally altered the direction of Egypt. Sadat was a national hero following the recapture of Egyptian territory from the Israelis in the Six Day War (1967). Due to this earned prominence and respect among his countrymen, when he became President in 1970, he had the latitude to revise and/or completely remove much of the political ideology of his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser. The anti-capitalistic principals known as “Nasserism†believed in socialism and called for the complete removal of Western influence over developing Arab nations. These were basically anti-American viewpoints, and so during the cold-war period, Egypt had turned to the Soviet Union for economic aide and military protection. Sadat basically opened up the Egyptian economy to foreign investments, broke ties with the USSR, and became the first Arab leader to meet officially with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (1977). The culmination of these negotiations would result in the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty for which Anwar El Sadat and Menachem Begin won the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. Not surprisingly, this made him unpopular among some Arabs and would ultimately lead to his 1981 assassination.
