Peace in the name of Allah: Egypt’s quest to attain Islamic legitimacy for its treaty with Israel

Abstract

This article analyzes the Egyptian regime’s quest to establish Islamic legitimacy for the transition from conflict to peace with Israel between 1977 and 1981. Based on an integrative analysis of a wide range of sources, it demonstrates that Islamic argumentations were at the core of Egypt’s official state campaign for peace. The appeal to Islamic justifications facilitated the regime’s efforts to describe its innovative peace policy as a natural link in the chain of traditional religious sequences and enclosed it within deeply socially embedded Islamic concepts and principles. Through a comparative analysis with the Islamist anti-peace campaign that the regime sought to refute, the article highlights that ‘Islam’ has no essential, consensual stance on peace with Israel. Rather, it demonstrates that different Muslim actors draw divergent – sometimes diametrically opposed – positions from Islamic texts in accordance with their particular needs and outlooks.