Egypt: A random bit of history

From an article entitled "Arab Government Responses to Islamic Finance: The Cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia," by Rodney Wilson, published in Autumn 2002 in the journal Mediterranean Politics.

Ali Sabri became Vice President of Egypt under Sadat, but he was dismissed from his post in May 1971, as Sadat alleged that he had been planning a coup. With the demise of Ali Sabri, al Najjar wasted no time in making a second attempt to start an Islamic bank in Egypt. This time the government was more receptive to his ideas, and the Nasser Social Bank was established under a special statute, Law 66 of 1971, which meant that it did not have to register with the Central Bank or be regulated by it....The first general manager of the bank was Dr Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, a former Egyptian Prime Minister who knew little about Islamic banking, but who was a trusted establishment figure.

Question: why was the government, prior to Ali Sabri's dismissal, hostile to the idea of an Islamic Bank?

My personal view is that Sadat was at first riding the post-Nasser wave of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalist ideology is a very different thing from Islamicist ideology, of course (as the generally secular orientation of leaders such as Nasser and Sadat serves to illustrate. The creation of a bank with specifically Islamic features may have seemed a dangerous concession to Sadat in his first year in office. After the abortive coup (real or imagined) of Ali Sabri, though, Sadat may have been more interested in finding domestic allies, and might have thought this a necessary concession, after all.

Notice that the creation of an institutioin for Islamic finance came with a symbolically important caveat -- a name that included Nassar's, and that gave no indication that there was anything specifically Islamic about this institution. That, and the leadership of Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, whom Sadat clearly considered safe.

I'm just guessing, though. If you know beter, feel free to correct me.