Since the shah went into his peripatetic exile, both his supporters and his foes have tried to rewrite the history of his rule. The former portray him as an enlightened modernizer and reformer, the latter as a villainous dictator “worse then Hitler. The shah traveled to several countries before entering the United States in October 1979 for medical treatment of his cancer.”
There is no doubt that the shah was an autocrat, who, in his later years, would not tolerate opposition and presided over a police state that employed systematic torture and executions. Cairo in 1980 was a city standing at the crossroads of history. The Arab world was deeply divided following Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, and Sadat himself was under intense regional isolation. Yet amid this political storm, the arrival of the exiled Shah brought a quiet gravity to the city.
