Abstract
The final round in the late President Anwar Sadat's campaign against all who criticised or opposed him took place a month before his death. On 3 September 1981 he ordered the detention of 1650 citizens, including intellectuals from all walks of life, and of various nationalist and progressive persuasions. Mr Khalid Muhyiddine, leader of the Progressive National Unionist Party (PNUP) described it as ‘the widest wave of arrests in the history of modern Egypt’, which hit ‘all the political wings’; and yet, as he told me a few days before Sadat's assassination, ‘ironically, Sadat's regime claims to have the support of the people’.