Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Naguib Mahfouz: One and a quarter century

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 August 2001 Issue No.546
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

One and a quarter century
On the 125th anniversary of the founding of Al-Ahram, one is compelled to recall how the institution has since undertaken what amounts to a race to establish a national newspaper.
In my day, all newspapers were subsumed within political parties and a paper's job was to be a party mouthpiece. Al-Ahram, by contrast, remained independent of political parties, which is why one encountered all the different political orientations on its pages. News published in Al-Ahram gained credibility because it did not serve a specific agenda.
Because readers did not buy Al-Ahram for purely political reasons, it also managed to pay more attention to cultural and literary questions than any other newspaper. Politics were the driving force of almost every other journalistic endeavour. Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad wrote in the Al-Wafd party's mouthpiece Kawkab Al-Sharq (Star of the East); Tawfik Diab wrote in Al-Jihad (The Struggle), a similarly partisan publication. But for readers and writers alike -- even literary writers like El-Aqqad and Diab -- the focus was invariably political. The morning paper provided an arena for political sparring, and little else.
In more recent times, Al-Ahram has managed to preserve these qualities: its news coverage enjoyed a remarkable degree of credibility, and the greatest writers and artists of the day -- Tawfik El-Hakim, Hussein Fawzi, Aisha Abdel-Rahman -- contributed cultural articles. So when Mohamed Hassanein Heikal approached me about joining the ranks, it was an honour.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.

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