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that lasted, the harder it would be to retrieve it. 68 The peace treaty that Sadat eventually signed with Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
    If the peace deal won Sadat international acclaim, he drew his sense of worth in Egypt from the war of 1973, and in particular the first act of that conflict known as ‘The Crossing’, when Egyptian soldiers managed to seize the east bank of the Suez Canal from the Israelis after they launched their surprise attack. As this is still the closest any Arab state has ever come to winning a war with Israel, the bold move is still celebrated in Egypt today. In terms of establishing his authority in the country it was as important a moment for Sadat as nationalising the Canal had been for Nasser. Each year on that day the ‘Hero of the Crossing’ Anwar Sadat bathed in the glory of his shining hour with a national holiday and a military parade. It provided a little light relief for a nation that, after the peace deal, was totally isolated from its Arab neighbours. Egypt was not allowed back into the Arab League until 1989.
    At the parade held on the morning of 6 October 1981 Sadat was sitting to the left of his vice-president Hosni Mubarak, who had won fame in the same conflict as an air force pilot. The men were in the front row of the podium as their soldiers drove by. Both were in full military regalia and they had just watched five fighter planes spewing coloured jet streams fly by when the first grenade was thrown. Seconds later gunmen leaped from one of the army trucks and started shooting into the stand. Sadat was shot several times and declared dead a few hours later after being airlifted to hospital. His assassination was caught on video camera and immediately broadcast around the world. Hosni Mubarak can be seen being whisked away by security men while Sadat lies dying on the floor. A few hours later he announced to the nation that Sadat was dead. 69
    There was gunfire that day in Lebanon too, but it was part of the public jubilation that erupted across the Arab world as they celebrated Sadat’s demise. 70
    The Americans sent three former presidents to join a host of international mourners. All but one of the Middle East’s Arab states, tiny Oman, boycotted the funeral. 71
    ‘I am Khalid al-Islambuli, I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ said the man who led the gunmen as they rampaged around the stand. 72 At his trial the following year al-Islambuli yelled to the gallery that he had killed Sadat because he did not rule in accordance with Sharia and because of the treaty he signed with Israel. He was one of five men executed for the attack. The men were all part of the Islamist group Al-Jihad which the young Ayman al-Zawahiri had helped set up shortly after Sayyib Qutb’s death.
    Sadat believed he could get away with defying almost the entire Arab world because he thought he had neutralised opposition at home and was winning new friends in the West. That mistake cost him his life. ‘[Anwar Sadat] took the fundamentalists out of the bottle,’ wrote al-Zawahiri. ‘[His] assumption of power marked the beginning of a new political transformation in Egypt represented by the end of the Russian era and the start of the American era.’ 73
    ‘Sadat was personally attuned to an Islamist idea of life,’ Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer told me as we sat in his study in Princeton University. During his twenty-nine-year career in the United States Foreign Service he acted as his country’s ambassador to both Egypt and Israel.
     
[Sadat] saw the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Nasser as a negative, and right after he came to power after 1970 there was the attempted coup by the Left. So everything would have led him to turn to the right as an internal stabiliser, and in that respect I think Zawahiri is right, there was a sense of opening that door or letting it out of the bottle a little. He tried in 1981 to stuff it back in but by then it was much too