As first lady of Egypt, Jehan Sadat championed social justice and women’s rights in Egypt and around the world, spearheading efforts to reform unfair divorce and custody laws, empower women economically, and advocate for women’s parliamentary representation. Her gentle leadership was distinct from the prowess of her husband, Anwar Sadat, who was president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981.

Mrs. Sadat passed on July 9, 2021 at the age of 87 after battling cancer. The most valuable tribute to someone who passed away is not grief, but in fact, gratitude, said Motaz Zahran, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, at the University of Maryland’s “Remembering Jehan Sadat” webinar. “We will always be grateful, appreciative, and  forever indebted to Mrs. Sadat for being such an illustrious personality of stellar and splendid qualities.”

Early Life, Marriage

Born in Cairo in 1933, young Mrs. Sadat was encouraged at school to pursue domestic interests such as sewing and cooking rather than academics. However, encouraged by her parents, she would go exploring the streets of her Al-Manial neighborhood. This would mark the start of her defiance and the unique trajectory she would take in her life.  

At the age of fifteen, she met her future husband, a divorced revolutionary man twice her age who had been recently jailed for resisting British occupation in Egypt. Enamored upon first meeting him, she said, in a 1987 interview with the Washington Post, that “to me Anwar was like a hero in a book.” While her parents did not initially approve, he proposed two months after they first met at her cousin’s home; they were married in May 1949 up until his death and had four children together.

“Even before she met him, she was half in love with him already,” her daughter, Noha El-Sadat, said. “And then she met him, and when she did, she said ‘this is the man I’m going to marry.’ She was sure that it was him.”

The First First Lady

One of her first dream projects, Talla Society, a cooperative she  began in the late 1960s with twenty-five sewing machines in an abandoned building, taught local women skills in order to encourage economic independence from their husbands. “She realized that if women were economically empowered, then they would also be politically empowered,” University of Maryland president Darryll Pines said.

Her husband held a series of senior positions in the government before being elected president in 1970 upon the death of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, and Jehan became the first president’s wife to take the title of first lady.

In 1972, Mrs. Sadat established the Wafa’ Wal Amal (Faith and Hope) Society, a fully integrated city for handicapped veterans and civilians. “She did not let any day pass without doing something good for the country,” former Minister of Insurance and Social Affairs Mervat Tellawy said when speaking about the society. The rehabilitation center is the first and largest of its kind in the Middle East, boasting clinics, national training programs, and recreation areas. She also worked closely with the Egyptian Blood Bank and the Egyptian Society for Cancer Patients.

Although she had begun her advocacy for women’s rights before becoming first lady, condemning female genital mutilation and helping local women become economically independent from their husbands, she began to assume a more public role after the 1973 October War, which granted Sadat increased legitimacy.

Mrs. Sadat’s advocacy of women’s rights and social justice was her personal credo, which she would defend privately to her husband. “Over half our population are women, Anwar,” she recorded telling her husband in her autobiography, A Woman of Egypt. “Egypt will not be a democracy until women are as free as men.” In 1975, she led the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations International Women’s Conference in Mexico City and again, in 1980, to the conference in Copenhagen. In what eventually became known as “Jehan’s laws”, her husband passed a series of decrees in summer of 1979,  improving women’s divorce status and setting aside a quota of thirty seats in parliament for women. These laws were later passed in parliament. 

She assumed an active role alongside her husband while he was president, an action which alienated people who were unaccustomed to this, but showed their strength in the face of criticism, Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, said. She also defended Sadat’s decision to sign the Camp David Peace Accords with Israel in 1979 after nearly three decades of war.  Against most expectations, the Camp David summit managed to bring about the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty that was signed six months later. However, signing the treaty was a divisive moment in Egyptian history and politics. 

Tellawy remembers Mrs. Sadat defended “the peace agreement better than any politician or analyst worldwide” even after President Sadat’s death.

In a statement written for the event, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter stated: “She made it clear to us that Sadat had given his life for Middle East peace that he, Menachem Begin, and I had consummated, and that she and Mubarak were ready to give their lives for the same goal.”

“Peace…is the defining theme of my life,” she wrote in a 2009 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, reflecting on the thirtieth anniversary of the controversial agreement. She remained enthusiastic and hopeful, stating: “In conditions like these, how could anyone hope for peace? But I do!”

In 1981, Anwar Sadat was shot by opponents of the peace plan during a parade commemorating the eighth anniversary of Operation Badr, the codename for the Egyptian military operation that took back a small portion of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel in 1973. He was airlifted to Maadi Military Hospital where he died two hours later.

“Every day?” she said in 1987. “No, I would say every minute I miss him. Every second.”

Education and Public Life After Sadat’s Death 

After a period of grief following Mr. Sadat’s death the next year, she returned to public life, moving to the United States, holding positions at Radford University and University of South Carolina, as well as giving lectures across the country.

Her charisma was electrifying to an extent that when she spoke, Egyptologist  Zahi Hawass remembered,the audience would be so silent you could hear a pin drop, he said.

Despite her husband’s death and her constant leadership on women’s issues, she was not satisfied without getting more education, Telhami remarked. At 41, Jehan Sadat enrolled in Cairo University, attending university at the same time as three of her children, and went on to earn her doctorate in Arabic Literature. She defended her master’s thesis (“The Influence of P.B. Shelley on Arabic Poetry in Egypt”) on television in 1980.

Her insistence on defending this thesis live was met with protest, remembered former president of University of Maryland, William Kirwan, to which Mrs. Sadat responded: “I want my defense on national television because I want the women of Egypt to see a man asking a woman a question and a woman giving the answer.”

For over a quarter century, Dr. Sadat was a fellow at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, where the Anwar Sadat Chair for Development and Peace was endowed in 1997 to honor her husband’s legacy. The chair was established to commemorate and protect the “progress that people have sacrificed their lives trying to defend,” Pines said. 

“She threw herself into the effort to create this chair, to help with all of the fundraising that would be necessary,” Kirwan remembered. It was the easiest fundraising assignment he had undertaken as “attendance was assured” when the event involved Mrs. Sadat. “People could not say no to her. That was just the universal love for her,” he said.

A Lasting Legacy: A First Lady Until the End

It is the details of one’s life that distinguishes one person from another, Zahran said. “Mrs. Sadat has lived like a candle in the wind, and certainly, thousands or even millions of candles can be lit from a single candle. That’s why millions of Egyptian women have been inspired by Mrs. Sadat and will always mourn her departure but cherish her legacy.”

She was awarded a posthumous national medal and a military funeral—the first of its kind for a woman—and was laid to rest next to her husband at the Unknown Soldier Memorial in Nasr City.

“I was very, very proud that she was the first woman in Egypt to have a military funeral and to be buried next to president Sadat, according to her wishes,” Tallawy said. “This is something to be written in history.”

Mrs. Sadat is survived by her children and eleven grandchildren, two of which spoke at the event. “She was a grandmother in every sense of the word,” Sherif Marei, her eldest grandson, said. “Her impact has transcended generations,” he added.

Mrs. Sadat remained, in some ways, a first lady of Egypt until the end.

“And what is in her heart? The love of Egypt. The love of her country. The love of the people of Egypt,” Hawass proclaimed. “Her name will be written in gold in the history of Egypt.”