With the beginning of Sadat’s rule in 1970 Egyptians started to shift back
to their previous Egyptian nationalism. Clear evidence of this could be seen
in the change in the name of the state from ‘United Arab Republic’ to ‘Arab
Republic of Egypt’, as well as in the change in the name of the country’s
only political party from ‘Arab Socialist Union’ to ‘National Democratic Party’.
This policy of de-Arabization culminated in Sadat’s signing of the Camp David
Agreement and in the official recognition of Israel as a state. Sadat paid for
this with his life, and Egypt with the political breach with the Arab countries,
which accused its government of treason against Palestine and dismissed it
from the Arab League for more than ten years, during which the headquar-
ters of the organization were shifted from Cairo to Tunis. In the 1991 Gulf
War, Egypt played a key role by taking sides with the USA against the Arab
leader Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Egyptian people’s opinion was divided
upon this issue. M. H. Heikal (1992) was one of those who criticized the
behaviour of the USA and their Arab allies, among whom was Saudi Arabia.
Relations between the Egyptians and the Arabs were pungently expressed in
a comedy titled Putting It in Classical Arabic, which lashed the Arabs of the
Gulf countries in biting satire for despising the Egyptian migrant labourers
and treating them like slaves. The play ran successfully for more than two
years with full houses in a theatre in Cairo in the early 1990s.