The once frosty relations between Egypt and Iran have notably thawed in recent months. Contacts between the two nations have moved to the point where Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister will go soon to Cairo for talks, as well as planned meetings between Iran and Egypt’s Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement meeting.
It had not been seen for some three decades. On February 22, two Iranian naval ships passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea. By itself, it was an uneventful transit. But seen in a larger context, the passage represented renewed relations between the two nations.
In earlier times, Egypt and Iran were bonded by marriage. Iran’s monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, wed Egypt’s Princess Fawzia Fuad in 1939. Though the couple later divorced, the two nations maintained diplomatic relations until Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
