Anwar sadat, wife

Mohammed Anwar al-Sadat was born in 1918 into a modest family in a poor village in the Nile delta.

Influenced from a young age by nationalist politicians such as Kamal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, Sadat hoped to end British occupation .

He graduated from the military academy when he was 20-years-old, but being an army officer did not prevent him from joining underground resistance movements.

With the second world war raging, Sadat calculated that Egypt’s best chance of overthrowing British rule lay in a German invasion.

In 1942, he was accused of consorting with a Nazi spy network in Cairo, fired from the army and imprisoned.

He was released from prison in 1948 and shortly after joined the nationalist Free Officers Movement, which had been founded by Jamal Abdul Nasser.

In July 1952, the young officers carried out a military coup that culminated in the overthrow of King Farouk and which subsequently brought more than 70 years of British colonisati