Word: gamal
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WHEN he succeeded the late Gamal Abdel Nasser last October, he was greeted with a cascade of tasteless jokes. "We're suffering two plagues at one time. First Nasser dies. Then we get Sadat." Haughty survivors of the ancient régime ridiculed him for his dusky skin (from his Sudanese mother) and because he had come from an impoverished delta village that is so remote, the nearest bus route is a mile away. Politicians dismissed him as a light-weight whose chief talent was sheer survival. When he delivered his first May Day speech in the steelmaking city of Helwan...
...school after the family moved to Cairo's Kubri al Quba section. Finally he secured an appointment to the military academy at Abbasiyah, which had just begun to accept sons of the lower classes as well as the aristocratic boys it traditionally favored. Sadat quickly became friends with Cadet Gamal Abdel Nasser, his classmate. "We were young men full of hope," wrote Sadat later in his Revolt on the Nile. "We were brothers-in-arms, united in friendship and common detestation of the existing order of things. Egypt was a sick country...
Sadat was the firebrand of the young officers' group that gathered around Nasser. His most spectacular idea was a plot to blow up the British embassy. Nasser talked him out of that. "I was always eager to step up the pace. But Gamal, a man of deliberation, acted as a restraining influence," Sadat once wrote. On the night of July 23, 1952, when the planners decided to move against King Farouk's corrupt regime, Sadat was nowhere to be found; he had gone to a movie in Cairo with his wife, Gehan. Eventually he received a message from Nasser, threw...
...tallest in Cairo. Nasser was a restless ball of energy who could work a 20-hour day. Sadat works at a less frenetic pace. He prefers to spend as much time as possible with his half Egyptian, half British second wife, Gehan, their three daughters and their son Gamal, 14, as well as with Sadat's two collies, Lassie and Whip. There are also three other daughters, all in their 20s and married to army officers. They are Sadat's children by his first wife; he is still legally married to her, as is permitted in Islam; she still lives...
...people of his native village. "We are farmers," he said, "and when one of us goes to express condolences, he takes along a tray of food for the house of the deceased out of courtesy. So the Soviet Union came with their tray to the funeral of Gamal." The Russian tray, however, was scarcely filled with food. After post-funeral discussions with Sadat, the Russians accelerated their shipments of military supplies to Egypt. This year, up to 150 MIG-21s have been delivered by sea along with added missiles, radar systems and tanks...