History of Egypt under Anwar Sadat Nasserists. Sadat encouraged the emergence of an Islamist movement which had been suppressed by Nasser. Believing Islamists to be socially conservative he gave them "considerable cultural and ideological autonomy" in exchange for political support. Following the disastrous Six-Day War of 1967, Egypt waged a War of Attrition in the Suez Canal zone. In 1971, four years into this war, Sadat endorsed in a letter the peace proposals of UN negotiator Gunnar Jarring which seemed to lead to a full peace with Israel on the basis of Israel's withdrawal to its pre-war borders. This peace initiative failed as neither Israel nor
Anwar Sadat were turned from bitter enemies into fast friends. The relationship between Cairo and Tehran became so friendly that the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, called Sadat his "dear brother". After the 1973 war with Israel, Iran assumed a leading role in cleaning up and reactivating the blocked Suez Canal with heavy investment. The country also facilitated the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Sinai Peninsula by promising to substitute the loss of the oil to the Israelis with free Iranian oil if they withdrew from the Egyptian oil wells in western Sinai. All these added more to the personal