I am pleased to introduce the Anwar Sadat Archives, an initiative of the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.  It is our goal to establish the most comprehensive electronic archive of publicly available, English-language material pertaining to the presidency of Anwar Sadat. To that end, we have assembled a vast number of records, both written and audio-visual, available for your review and viewing. 

 We will continue to update this archive, as we acquire new material, adding new categories as needed. At a later phase of this project, we will link this site to the Alexandria Library in Egypt, which is engaged in a parallel effort concerning Arabic-language material on the Sadat presidency.  

We believe that this archive will be useful to students and scholars, as well as members of the policy community, interested in primary-source material on Anwar Sadat. At the same time, we hope that the general public, too, will benefit from the wealth of information attesting to the important contributions President Sadat made to his country, to U.S.-Egypt relations, and to peace.  

At this stage, the following categories are featured in the archive:

·        Correspondence With President Sadat

·        Summits And Peace Agreements

·        Congressional Legislation

·        Addresses To Congress And Remarks By Members Of Congress

·        Egyptian-Israel Disengagement Negotiations

·        Presidential Dinners And Receptions

·        Presidential Remarks To The Press

·        Presidential Speeches

·        President Sadat's Death And Legacy

·        President Sadat's Address To The Knesset

·        Video Clips

·        Bibliographical References

·        Links

 Anwar Sadat’s presidency spanned four U.S. administrations. Throughout our site, you will therefore find historic documents, pictures, and film footage of President Sadat in the company of U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. President Sadat enjoyed a special relationship with each of these presidents, earning their trust and respect. He brought U.S.-Egyptian relations to a new level of friendship, as is evidenced by the mutually warm displays of affection and expressions of support in the correspondence, speeches, and toasts included in the archive.

 Much of this material was made available us through the help of several individuals who were extremely generous with their time, resources, and logistical support. In no particular order, I wish to thank archivists David J. Stanhope of the Jimmy Carter Library, Kenneth Hafeli and Nancy E. Mirshah and  archives technician Joshua Cochran of the Gerald Ford Library, and Ray Wilson of the Ronald Reagan Library for their terrific audio-visual material; Mary Curry of the National Security Archive for her assistance in navigating that archive’s  impressive collection of documents; Professor Saliba Sarsar of Monmouth  University for granting us permission to include his comprehensive bibliography  of Anwar Sadat in our archive; librarian Annie Young of the McKeldin Library at  the University of Maryland for pointing out the broad array of relevant material  available at our university; and Dan Navarro, Marie Gates, and Adam Singh of the Office of Academic Computing Services (OACS) at the University of Maryland for  building and maintaining this site.

Creating an electronic archive from scratch is no simple task. Indeed, many hours have gone into assembling, categorizing, and summarizing the numerous documents and audio-visual material we are able to access from this site. I wish to thank my assistant Aneesa Din and the following students for their time and dedication to this project: Omri Arens, Anthony Glynn, Jennifer Joseph, Daniel Prud’homme, Christine Shehata, Reed Southard, Chanan Weissman, Sarah Wetherald. But I will especially single out Guy Ziv, who is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Government and Politics and served as my research assistant. Guy took the lead in contacting various sources, helped manage the work of the student assistants, and was innovative and careful in helping organize the project.  

 We hope you will find the archive useful for your needs, academic or otherwise.

 Sincerely,

Shibley Telhami 

Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development