I could not sleep the night that I wrote this. I was kept awake by the anxiety that my words would not do adequate justice to the gratitude and recognition he merits. Of course, my words are hardly needed for his name to shine internationally, and for him to assume an eminent place in our nation's history. Nevertheless, I felt that my personal expression of gratitude needed to be commensurate with his distinguished stature. At the same time, streams of thoughts and emotions were surging inside me. I therefore decided to focus, here, on Boutros Boutros-Ghali the human being, an aspect of him that is unfamiliar to those who did not have the good fortune to know him personally. My acquaintance with Boutros-Ghali goes back half a century, to when I saw him for the first time, ascending to a university podium, in 1965. He looked much younger than his age and he was elegant but unpretentious. Before that I had followed him and his ideas via the journal Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya (International Politics). In my courses with him, in my third year at university, I, along with my colleagues, were even more impressed, not just by his prolific knowledge but also by his ability to condense it and simplify it in a way that could be grasped by students who were still in the early phases of their formation. At the end of every lecture he would ask for questions. If no answers were forthcoming, he would put questions to us. In this manner he helped to develop our faculties for critical thought. After I graduated and was hired as an assistant teacher at the faculty, he asked me, and others, to write articles for Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya. The journal was our first training ground in academic research. One day he handed me a study prepared by a prominent diplomat and asked me to restructure it. When I balked at the task, because I was nothing compared to the eminent stature of the study's author, he told me not to worry because I had a “sense of construction”. Such encouragement gave me an enormous boost at the start of my academic career. Subsequently, he did me the honour of supervising my Master's degree thesis, an honour I received again when it came time to do my doctorate. On both occasions we chose the topic of the thesis after lengthy discussions in which he gave me absolute freedom to air my ideas. I recall that, in one of those discussions, he rejected a topic that I had been very keen on. I asked him why. He answered, “Really? Don't you reject my suggestions without giving a reason?” By the time I was due to defend my doctoral thesis in April 1978, Boutros Ghali had become a minister. But in keeping with his well-known modesty, he attended the defence and afterwards allowed us students to gather around him for photographs. For one photograph, a student even rushed to kneel behind Ghali's chair, positioning a portion of his upper body above the minister's head. Ghali was undaunted but it only required a glance at his guards to see how nervous they were. I have never encountered anyone with his degree of tolerance and magnanimity. His success would sometimes inspire jealousy in some of his colleagues, who would occasionally offend him. Once, after he became minister, one of those colleagues came to him with an urgent request. He responded immediately, with no hint of resentment and, in fact, more benevolently than the requester could ever have imagined. Nor have I ever encountered anyone with his degree of integrity. One day he asked me to update and revise portions of, and add new parts to, his famous Introduction to Political Science that he co-authored with Dr Khairi Issa. I was overjoyed by this unparalleled honour. Later, not only did my name appear in the introduction to the new edition with a description of my contributions to it, but there came the great surprise a year later when Sobhi Grace, the most honest Egyptian publisher I have ever known, called me up to ask me to drop by his office to pick up a cheque. “For what?” I asked. He explained that Dr Boutros had insisted on dividing the royalties for the new edition three ways, between Dr Khairi, me, and himself. That royalty continued to be paid to me faithfully throughout the many years that the volume continued to be studied in colleges of political science in Egypt and other Arab countries. I have never encountered anyone with his degree of dedication to fairness and justice. A former and very talented student of mine once came to me and complained that while he had passed the written examination to join the diplomatic corps, he had failed the oral entrance exam. He suspected that his social status was the reason. He said that he took the written exam again but was afraid that he would fail the oral exam a second time. I told him not to worry and I called Dr Ghali and conveyed the student's complaint. The former student came to me immediately after he sat the oral exam for the second time. He was very depressed. He told me that Dr Ghali had insisted on attending the oral exam personally and had asked the candidate what his father did for a living. I told the student/candidate, “You obviously do not know Dr Ghali. He certainly has given you the grade you merit and his question was a message to the other members of the jury that your social status should not affect their evaluation of you.” As it turns out, that candidate not only passed the exam with flying colours, he went on to become one of Egypt's most eminent and successful diplomats. I have never encountered anyone as objective as him. After completing the draft of my Master's thesis, which was on Soviet policy toward Israel, he noted that I had not discussed the impact of Soviet Muslims on that policy. I told him that they have none. He asked me whether I had actually studied the subject. I had to say that I had not. He told me, “Go study it and then formulate a conclusion.” He must have noticed a startled expression on my face because he then said: “You cannot ignore the Islamic component in this phenomenon.” He then added: “Some people did not want me to include a chapter on Islamic political thought in the Introduction to Political Science. I had to write it myself.” Take it from me, it is one of the most powerful chapters in the book. The direct contacts between Dr Ghali and myself diminished after he became UN secretary-general and then the first secretary-general of the International Organisation of Francophonie (OIF). But they resumed when, by chance, he became chairman of the National Council for Human Rights and I was appointed a member. During the three years that I was a member of that council, I was in as much as awe of him as I had been during those distant days when I was a third-year university student. Naturally, he would seem more formidable after the experience he acquired with the UN. I visited him twice in these last months, before his surgery in Paris. The signs of exhaustion were evident on his slender frame that had borne the burdens of an energetic man who had given so much to the world. Nevertheless, he insisted on doing as he always did when I came to visit, which was to get up from his desk and come sit in front of me. When I objected, he said, “We teach people protocol. Shouldn't we respect it ourselves?” On the second occasion, he almost fell when he stood up to see me off. I rushed over to catch him and helped him back to his desk. I then kissed his head and his hand with the most heartfelt reverence. May you rest in peace, my great and noble teacher, and may God bless you on behalf of all who are indebted to you for your knowledge, expertise and moral rectitude.
The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
