Anwar Sadat was born in a Nile Delta village and born again, as it were, in a prison cell. In his speeches and writings he has often contrasted the disorder of cities with the virtuous simplicity of life in hamlets, like his home village of Mil Abu el Kom. Curiously, Sadat has also described as "the happiest period of my life" eight of the 18 months in 1947-48 that he spent in Cell 54 of Qurah Maydan, awaiting trial for complicity in the political assassination of Amin Osman Pasha, a former minister in King Farouk 's government. There Sadat developed a philosophy of life that, he today insists, guided him as a revolutionary and later as President of Egypt. In the following excerpts from his forthcoming autobiography, In Search of Identity, to be published in April by Harper & Row, Sadat describes his feeling for village life, and the almost mystic happenings in Cell 54.
"The treacle has arrived," announces the local crier in the alleys and squares of our village: my grandmother rushes outside, dragging me along beside her, toward the canal where a ship loaded with treacle has just arrived from the nearby Kafr Zirqan. The road is not long, but every step fills me with joy and pride: men stand up as we pass to greet Grandmother. Though illiterate, she is a haven for everybody; she solves their problems and cures their sick with old Arab concoctions of medical herbs unrivaled in our village or in any of the neighboring ones. We buy a big jar of treacle and return home. Behind her I trot along—a small dark boy, barefooted and wearing a long Arab dress over a white calico shirt—with eyes fixed on the jar of treacle, a treasure won at last.
Everything made me happy in Mil Abu el Kom, even cold water in the winter when we had to leave at dawn for the flush canal—a canal filled to overflowing for no more than two weeks, our "statutory" irrigation period, during which all land in the village had to be watered. We worked together on the land of one of us for a whole day then moved to another's.
That kind of collective work—with no profit, or any kind of individual reward, in prospect—made me feel that I belonged not merely in my immediate family at home, or even the big family of the village, but in something vaster and more significant: the land. It was that feeling that made me, on the way home at sunset, watch the evening scene with a rare warmth, recognizing an invisible bond of love and friendship with everything around me—smoke rolling down the valley, promising a delicious meal at the close of a village day, and perfect calm and peace in the hearts of all.
This big shady tree was made by God; He decreed it: it came into being. These fresh green plants whose seeds we had ourselves sown could never have been there if God had not decreed it. This land on which I walk; the running water in the canal; indeed, everything around me was made by an overseeing God—a vast, mighty Being that watches and takes care of all, including me. Trees, seeds and fruits are all, therefore, my fellows in existence; we all came out of the land and could never exist without it. And the land is firm and tough; all that belong to it must be equally tough.