Kourosh Ziabari – AGSIW: After more than four decades of frozen relations, signs are emerging that Iran and Egypt are seeking to thaw ties. Since its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran has professed an unwavering commitment to the ideal of Islamic solidarity, but that avowal has often rung hollow, given its thorny relations with most of the Muslim world heavyweights, including Egypt.
A senior Iranian member of parliament said on May 14 that there have been backdoor negotiations between Iran and Egypt hosted in Baghdad, and a deal to normalize diplomatic ties is imminent. Fada Hossein Maleki, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan between 2007 and 2012, told Tasnim News Agency that a meeting between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is in the cards, to follow the reopening of embassies in the two capitals. More significantly, Iran’s supreme leader said in a May 29 meeting with Oman’s visiting sultan that he’d “welcome” the restoration of full diplomatic ties between Egypt and Iran, raising the prospect of Cairo and Tehran normalizing relations after decades of strain.
That the supreme leader signaled an openness to a rapprochement with Egypt during his meeting with the sultan of Oman, whose office has traditionally played the role of a trusted broker in Iran’s disputes with other countries, reinforced speculations that Maleki had alluded to earlier. It is quite likely that aside from Iraq, Oman is also working to facilitate a restoration of ties between Iran and Egypt.
Like Iran’s relations with many of its traditional partners, ties with Egypt were one of the early casualties of the Islamic Revolution. Indeed, until that rupture, as two of the world’s oldest civilizations, their engagement had harkened back to the time of the founder of the first Persian kingdom, Cyrus the Great, who ruled from 558-529 B.C. Before the 1979 political transition ushered in a theocracy in Iran, the two countries had been carving out a new fraternity. Although Egypt under the pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was not sympathetic to the secular Iran’s pro-Israel leanings, his successor, Anwar Sadat, patched up the frayed relations and forged an alliance.
Relations in the modern era were jumpstarted as far back as 1939, when the Iranian heir apparent Mohammad Reza Pahlavi married Princess Fawzia, a daughter of Fuad I, the sultan of Egypt and Sudan, which provided for a royal harmony that bolstered bilateral relations. Although the shah’s divorce from Fawzia nine years later spawned a diplomatic rupture, relations bounced back shortly afterward.
In the 1960 Nasser-led break, Cairo severed diplomatic relations with Tehran over the shah’s earlier recognition of Israel. Ten turbulent years passed before the two countries restored ties. Anwar Sadat became president in 1971, and he initiated a new, cordial partnership with the imperial Iran. When the revolution led by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent the shah into exile, Egypt, under Sadat, gave him sanctuary. The decision by Egypt to welcome Pahlavi, coupled with the conclusion of the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty a year later, outraged the Islamists, who had implanted a new anti-Israel hostility in Iran’s foreign policy.
Khomeini and Sadat launched broadsides against each other in public, while Khomeini called on Egyptians to overthrow their president. The same anti-Israel vendetta that had motivated Nasser to cut ties with Iran in 1960 animated Khomeini’s decision to sever relations with Egypt upon taking power. Iran’s unseemly celebration of Sadat’s assassination and Egypt’s subsequent support for Saddam Hussein as he invaded Iran in 1980 deepened the mutual animus, and, despite some sporadic overtures in the following years, no breakthrough was achieved under Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for three decades. Small interest offices in the two capitals with negligible leeway and limited staff continued to represent the two countries diplomatically, and the contentious nature of relations was not reversed.
The cascade of revolutionary change in the Arab world and the ouster of Mubarak in 2011 presented an opportunity for transformation. The newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, visited Tehran in August 2012 to participate in the Non-Aligned Movement summit, becoming the first Egyptian leader to travel to Iran since 1979. Then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to the historic visit by traveling to Cairo in February 2013. The two countries announced a tentative agreement on reopening their embassies and even floated a proposal for resuming direct flights for the first time in three decades.
Those plans didn’t actually materialize, however, perhaps due to the Iranian government lacking a coherent foreign policy roadmap or more likely foundering as the Sisi-led coup in Egypt reoriented the country’s Iran policy. But the Sisi government over the years avoided the type of overly harsh anti-Iran agenda its anti-Islamist leanings might otherwise have signaled. For the Raisi administration, having antagonized much of the international community and alternately concerned about – and insisting on – pursuing confrontation with the West, looking to revamp relations with forces in the Arab world and fully restoring relations with Cairo would make sense. It seems to afford Tehran some room for maneuver in its regional ambitions.
In recent months, Iranian officials, somewhat pretextually, have brought up reconciliation with Egypt as a way to build cohesion and unity in the Muslim world. While critics of the Raisi administration have accused his diplomatic team of being incompetent and inexperienced, the Foreign Ministry seems to be benefiting from the momentum generated by the successful deal with Saudi Arabia, even though that agreement was mostly hammered out by the Supreme National Security Council.
In February, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said a new page has begun in Iran’s relations with regional countries, which he described as an outcome of Raisi’s regional synergy initiative, adding, “misunderstandings will be resolved and Iran’s relations with the regional countries, including Egypt and Jordan, will be strengthened.” In May, he said he hopes to see a “serious opening” in bilateral relations, noting that there are countries involved in trying to improve ties between Tehran and Cairo.
Egypt is one of the few Arab countries without an embassy in Tehran. Yet, the interest offices representing the two countries are currently headed by senior diplomats from each state, and messaging from diplomats on the two sides suggests taking relations to the next level might be possible. The Egyptian government has recently announced that it is set to make arrangements for Iranians traveling with tour groups to obtain visas on arrival if they wish to visit the Sinai Peninsula. Tourist visas are currently not issued to Iranian passport holders.
In the absence of meaningful diplomatic targets of opportunity elsewhere in the world, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Central Asia, seem to represent Raisi’s best bets for strengthening relations that can ease the harsh isolation his government faces. To be sure, these restored relations, whether with Egypt or others, will remain hostage to the extremes of Iran’s broader foreign policy, which is marred by wrangling with the West and a destabilizing nuclear program. But at least in the short run, a thaw with Egypt may help an economically besieged Iranian government rattled by popular protests boost its regional standing.
This article was originally published in Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington