CAIRO: Jehan Sadat, widow of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, died in Egypt on Friday. She was 87.
In recent weeks, Egyptian media press reported that she had been hospitalised and was battling cancer. Last year, she received medical treatment in the United States but was hospitalised again shortly after returning home as her condition deteriorated, her family told local newspapers. No further details about her illness were made available.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s office said later Friday that she had been a role model for Egyptian women and granted her a national award posthumously. A key highway in Cairo was named after her. She will be buried after a military funeral ceremony on Friday.
Jehan Safwat Raouf was born in August 1933 in Cairo to an Egyptian middle-class father and a British mother. In 1949, at age 15, she married Anwar Sadat, a military officer at the time who later served as Egypt’s president from 1970 until his assassination by Islamic extremists in 1981.
It was said that initially, her parents had opposed her marrying a man 15 years her senior. She later said that what attracted her to Sadat at such a young age were his revolutionary activities that challenged the British occupation in the 1940s. The couple had four children: daughters Noha, Gihan, Lobna and a son, Gamal.
Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2021
