When I was invited to participate in the setting up of a new English-language weekly newspaper to be published by Al-Ahram, I doubt I could have imagined, 15 years on, being invited to contribute to a special edition of that same newspaper celebrating a decade and a half of publication under three editors. For while those of us who worked on the new paper in its earliest days were left in no doubt as to the commitment to it on the part of the parent organisation, Al-Ahram, we perhaps could not have known whether there would turn out to be a readership for a new English-language paper, quickly dubbed Al-Ahram Weekly, either in Egypt, which at the time already had several English-language titles, regionally, or abroad. In the event we need not have worried. Over the course of its 15-year existence Al-Ahram Weekly has succeeded in gaining a considerable national and international reputation, helping to fulfill the hopes that were then invested in it and, indeed, going beyond them. The Weekly, it was said then, would be independent in its news coverage and editorial stance, though drawing on the authority and expertise of Al-Ahram, and it would open its pages to the greatest possible variety of points of view, while conserving its essential Egyptian and Arab identity. Furthermore, the Weekly would serve as a kind of "bridge" between east and west, and it would act as a forum for ideas, using English as a kind of international lingua franca. If the paper's subsequent national and international recognition is anything to go by, together with its lively correspondence columns, then the Weekly has more than reached those aims. However, gratifying though this success must be for the paper's editors, in the early days such recognition would have seemed a long way off, as there were other more pressing considerations to think about. Who would be working on the new paper? Who would the contributors be? What, exactly, would the paper's relationship be to Al-Ahram? Would it aim to represent the content of the Arabic paper, or would it have a separate identity? Would it reproduce the work of Al-Ahram's commentators and columnists, and, if so, which? How much weight would be given to domestic, regional and international news? What, finally, would readers want to see in Al-Ahram Weekly ? Come to think of it -- who, exactly, would those readers be? Some of these questions were quickly answered, having to do with the vision of the paper already decided upon in the top echelons of Al-Ahram. The paper's core team consisted of senior journalists at Al-Ahram, initially Hosny Guindy, foreign editor of Al-Ahram and editor-in-chief of the Weekly, Hassan Fouad, political editor of Al-Ahram and deputy editor of the Weekly, Samir Sobhi, in charge of the paper's layout and design, and Mahmoud Murad, who oversaw the paper's editorial content. In addition to this core team of senior Al-Ahram staff, Ahram bureau chiefs abroad were invited to contribute, as were younger staff members from the Arabic paper and from other Ahram publications. Analysts from the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies could be expected to contribute, and Ahram columnists Mohamed Sid-Ahmed and Salama Ahmed Salama began contributing regular columns, Sid-Ahmed sending his in already impeccable English, Salama's arriving a day or two before publication in Arabic and then translated into English by one of the new paper's growing band of translators. Ibrahim Nafie, then chairman of the board of Al-Ahram, contributed a regular column adapted from material appearing in Friday's weekend edition of the Arabic paper, and other regular features and formats were added, such as Naguib Mahfouz's short reflections, a weekly press review, first of the Egyptian, and then also of the Arab press, and cartoons drawn from the work of Ahram cartoonists. In addition to the core team of Ahram staff, outside consultants were hired. Wadie Kirolos arrived from a career in international news reporting, later becoming the paper's home news editor, as did Bahgat Badie, and Louis Greiss, a former editor of the Cairo magazine Sabah El-Kheir, took time out from his post as director of public relations at the American University of Cairo to advise at the new paper. Mursi Saad EL-Din provided expert assistance and advice drawn from a fund of experience going back several decades. Sophie Sarwat, then on the organising committee of the 1991 All Africa Games, hosted in Cairo, took sports coverage in hand, and Mourad Wahba provided expert input into the paper's coverage of economics. Mamdouh El-Dakhakhni began the task of overseeing the quality and consistency of the paper's use of English: as chief sub-editor he had an unusually challenging role to play, given the heterodox nature of the copy. Sometimes this was translated from Arabic, sometimes written in English by writers for whom English was not a first language, sometimes taken from the wires or other sources and rewritten, headlined and re-presented in what under his guidance was to become characteristic Weekly style. Young graduates in Mass Communications were hired following the completion of their studies at Cairo University or the American University in Cairo. Some members of the initial core staff are still with the paper, some having since moved on to other things and others, sadly, having been taken from us. Of the original Weekly team, Hassan Fouad and Mohamed Sid-Ahmed died in February this year, the paper's founding editor, Hosny Guindy, having died in 2003. Hosny did more than anyone to ensure that the paper appeared and that it continued to meet the high standards set for it, and he was remembered in a special edition of Al-Ahram Weekly that appeared in August 2003. Important questions having thus been quickly answered, the appointment of the Weekly 's core editorial team and wider group of writers and contributors meant that the paper's identity, too, began to take shape. However, this still left open the question of the paper's content. What added value could Al-Ahram Weekly, then unknown, bring that was not already available in other Arab or international journalism? Part of the answer to this question came from Al-Ahram. There had long been a desire on the part of the organisation to reach a wider, international audience. Arabic being a difficult language to learn and one largely unfamiliar to western and other readers who might nevertheless have a keen, but unsatisfied, interest in Egyptian, Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, it seemed clear that English would need to be the medium through which that audience could be reached, though Al-Ahram also launched a weekly French-language paper, the Ahram hebdo, some years later. Furthermore, that audience would have certain expectations of any title published by Al-Ahram as a national media organisation, and it would go to it looking for particular content. The paper's editorial line would be of obvious interest to readers seeking authoritative comment, from an Egyptian perspective, on the issues of the day, and it was felt that many readers would value finding the work of leading commentators, such as Sid-Ahmed, Salama Ahmed Salama, and others, gathered together in one weekly digest and translated into English. For these reasons, it was decided early on that one of the most important features of the new paper would be its opinion and editorial pages, and though these would always contain certain in-house staples they would also be open to diverse outside contributions, as, indeed, is still the case. Home news, too, should be a priority of the new paper, as should Arab and foreign news reporting that drew upon the unique position of Al-Ahram and the organisation's network of foreign bureau. The Ahram Weekly would not reproduce foreign news reports provided by the wire services, or even necessarily run their photographs. Readers of the new paper would want to read something different from what was already available, and they would value the Egyptian and Arab perspective that Al-Ahram was in a position to provide. This was even more the case for domestic news: though there were other English-language newspapers available at the time the Weekly was launched, some enjoying a clear market identity, non-Arabic speaking readers, to whom the Arabic press was closed, would value greater in-depth reporting of domestic news and debate. Later, the Weekly even pioneered a new, investigative style of news reporting in Egypt, helping to set the national news agenda and bringing issues of concern to public notice. Other areas of the paper were conceived as extensions of this desire to provide the kind of authoritative coverage of Egyptian affairs that was not available elsewhere in English, aiming also to broaden and deepen that coverage. The profile feature, for example, now given the title of "encounter", aimed to introduce readers to figures of contemporary interest from all walks of life. The paper's culture section, from the first planned across two pages, would also have an important role to play in widening awareness among non-Arabic speakers of Egyptian and Arab film, music, literature and the arts. It could also play a proselytizing role by translating and publishing the works of Arab writers into English, in some cases writers who had not been translated before, helping to promote them to new audiences. Features and a section entitled "living" would help provide depth, and these sections were perhaps the origin of the numerous supplements that the Weekly now puts out. A further feature of the paper's extended cultural coverage was its readiness to promote all aspects of cultural life, from youth culture to the doings of the various official bodies. In doing so, the paper was able to draw on contributions from within Al-Ahram, such as Nagwa El-Ashri on art, as well as from outside critics, including Nehad Selaiha on theatre and David Blake on music. David Blake in particular, with the Weekly from its inception, had a wide following among readers, many turning to his column first as soon as the paper appeared. The obituary notices that appeared following his death in February 2002 are a measure of the affection in which he was held. From the beginning the intention was to produce the first edition of the paper in February 1991, the date given by the International Coalition to the Saddam regime in Iraq to leave Kuwait or face military consequences. In the months leading up to this launch date zero issues were produced, the aim being to ensure that staff could meet the various production deadlines and that the resulting issue was as free as possible from glitches or mistakes. These zero issues, never published, are now collectors' items. At the time, though, their value lay much more in what they taught us. Working, in 1990 and 1991, on electric typewriters and crammed into tiny offices between Al-Ahram's weekly sports magazine, Al-Ahram Al-Riyadi, and scattered bits of other publications, among them the youth magazine Al-Shabab, Weekly staff fought an uncertain battle for office space and resources, all the while trying to meet Ahram Wednesday afternoon production deadlines. Computer equipment of the type now used to lay out the Weekly was only on the horizon in 1991 when the first issues appeared, and the paper was produced on linotype machines which, excellent for the Arabic paper and the latest technology when they were installed, had uncertain results when adapted for the English paper. Not only did all copy, much of it handwritten, have to be sent to be typed by banks of typists sitting in refrigerated rooms on the lower floors of the old Al-Ahram building in Galaa Street, but these typists did not necessarily know English. The result was that the reels of linotype copy that made it back upstairs to the paper's editorial offices could sometimes bear small resemblance to their originals. Terminals did not have English keyboards, the computer alone somehow having been adapted to produce Times Roman type, and the final process of proof-reading the laid-out pages, pasted up by hand in a cutting room also used for other, Arabic-language publications, could easily take far longer than anticipated, or end in blows. This was particularly the case if, as sometimes happened, the machine had decided to produce linotype copy entirely in italics, or in bold, or in 10pt, or if the painstaking work of fitting headlines and copy lengths to pre-arranged areas on the hand-made page necessitated lopping off paragraphs at the last minute to reach the deadline, or rewriting a 35-character headline in 20 to make the space. There must have been a sigh of relief all round when the linotype machines and the journalistic culture that went with them were consigned to oblivion a few years later, Al-Ahram, like newspapers the world over, moving to desk-top layout on Apple machines. These made it possible to input copy and design pages in one action, doing away with the kinds of wobbles and glitches produced even in the final print copy by the previous linotype paste-up system and machines. In fact, from its earliest days onwards the Ahram Weekly has had a vanguard role to play in adopting the new technologies and in finding new ways to reach new reservoirs of readers. It was, for example, among the first Arab papers to see and exploit the potential of the Internet in 1997, and the paper's Website now attracts readers the world over in search of authoritative Egyptian, Arab and Middle Eastern news and comment in English. Though the Egyptian media environment has changed dramatically from what it was in 1991 when the first copies of the Ahram Weekly hit the newsstands, competition having been introduced from new Egyptian English-language publications as well as from Arabic titles and, of course, from the swift development of satellite and cable broadcasting, the Weekly has managed to conserve its market segment intact as well as its reputation both at home and abroad. While this success is due, above all, to those who have written for the paper over the past 15 years, one would still like to think that at least a very small part of it may be due to those of us who shivered long hours among the refrigerated old linotype machines, or cheerfully looked forward to what could well have been a very late night each Tuesday evening to meet Wednesday's page deadlines, when the paper first came out 15 years ago. David Tresilian joined the Weekly's core team in 1990 working as full-time copy-editor and associate culture editor until Oct. 1992 when he left Cairo to New York to read for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. He is presently based in Paris from where he contributes articles to the culture and international sections of the paper and co-edits the Weekly's books supplement.
