By Assem El-Kersh Between two centuries, 1,000 weeks ago, this newspaper was born; its destiny, to establish a distinct experience on Egypt's Fleet Street. It seemed to know the way before it even learned to walk, from the first moment and the first step. Those of us who remember the circumstances under which the first issue of the Weekly appeared, on the last day of February 1991, will perhaps testify that it has been trying, for 7,000 days since, to sustain an unprecedented Egyptian professionalism combining balance and liberalism. To extend a bridge to the Other -- the reader of English at home and everywhere -- it introduced that formula many years before any other newspaper. The attempt to understand, to engage in dialogue, to meet on a common ground has not stopped. Whether the timing of the Weekly 's launch was a coincidence or a choice determined by the circumstances of the time, the launch itself was akin to setting sail in unchartered seas; it was a difficult challenge for all those who decided to join the crew. Greeting its readers on the way to a new century, it had to pay farewell to a century heavy with wounds, which had already begun to witness the endings of an old, clamorous and brutish world -- an ingenious time at which the wonders of science, the calculations of politics and the surprises of economics intersected with the clanging of arms, the cries of the victors and the groans of the defeated. The newspaper proceeded with the same sensible rhythm, lasting stamina and patient smile that characterised the late Founding Editor Hosny Guindy as he stood at the helm for nearly 12 years. Sailing, he passed dozens of secrets onto the sea captains: Hani Shukrallah, who ably took over after Guindy, together with Mona Anis and dozens of young people who became familiar with Room 902 where Guindy's modest office was. With this ammunition and the experience of old comrades at arms -- Samir Sobhi, Luis Greis, Hassan Fouad, Mohamed Salmawy and others -- the Weekly has not ceased to present, under Guindy and after him, what many have called "a different journalism for a different time". This journey has taken the Weekly across a remarkable distance of time. The beginnings involved sending reports and analyses by fax or dictating them by land line using a rotary phone, searching for information in paper archives and writing up news stories on primitive keyboards. Over 19 or more years, Weekly reporters and editors who have grown up and matured within its walls have been transported to the time of the iPad, Google, the camera phone and e-mail (at the time the Internet was but a year or two old, and Egypt had to wait till 1997 to start using it commercially on a large scale). In parallel there occurred countless transformations in issues of concern, in printing technology and the newspaper market, the temperament of the readership, the character of society, the conditions of the region and the world, all of which a publication like the Weekly could not afford to ignore. And this is what makes everything about our job (the only job that seeks out trouble as well as being sought out by it) a completely different thing now to what it used to be in the past. Things are so different it seems the old world in which our first issue appeared is no longer there, that it has disappeared completely. That world has left behind only scattered memories, lessons engraved in the heart and the line chosen by the newspaper since it opened its eyes to a fast dying 20th century some nine years before its official death. It was the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, on 26 December 1991, marking the end of the age of empire, colonialism and revolution, perturbations that ended with the birth of a New World Order led by a single great power that tries to impose its will in a world already unified, in spite of everything, thanks to the Internet which turned "www" into the most important combination of letters in the history of human language. Likewise the banners of globalisation, new media, the germ of democracy, free markets and early signs of prosperity started fluttering over new parts of the world, while others -- with less growth, fewer opportunities and more misery -- went on sinking in the quicksand of their circumstances, their helplessness and the idiocy of some of their governments particularly in Africa, but also in many parts of the Middle East, whose chronic issue -- Palestine -- remained unresolved despite every promise and augury of change, not to mention the discourses of peace promoted through the 1990s and after. The Weekly always had its fill and more, as it concerned itself, week after week, with following what went on here in Egypt and in the surrounding region and the world at large, in the way of countless interactions, developments and clashes. Thus it was our destiny to take our first steps the day the First Gulf War ended. The front page story wondered whether a new regional Arab order would dawn after the machine guns grew silent: the exact same idea that continues to worry us today, so many years later. How many wars and conflicts, how many coups and occasions for grief, how many victories and defeats, questions and issues, pictures and headlines pass through a newspaper that has been in circulation for 20 years? At the Weekly we had an endless list of hot spots in every corner of the world to cover. The vicious circle of violence and obstinacy never stopped. We devoted many pages to the Oslo Accords, Yeltsin's coup, the assassination of both Rabin and Bhutto, the departure of Diana, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the arrival of the third millennium, the tides of Jewish immigration into Israel, and afterwards the blows of 11 September, the war on terrorism, Iraq's misfortune, the invasion of Afghanistan, the bombardment of Lebanon, the destruction of Gaza, inter-Palestinian division, the saga of Arab impotence, the Obama phenomenon and the riddle of Bin Laden's disappearance. Still, despite any justified and required attention paid to our region and our world, Egypt has remained our primary interest and principal concern. In the 1990s the noise and influence of satellite channels and their talk shows in particular had not yet materialised. At the time no one had heard of the mobile phone or the SMS or the megamalls, nor had we been introduced to constitutional amendments, the endless debate over the bequest of the presidency or privatisation. Later on, many new terms were to enter the lexicon: Suzanne Tamim, Marina, Nugoum FM, the Policy Committee, Al-Qaeda, Inspector Korombo, cloning, Abu Treika, niqab, Haifaa Wahbi, private- sector newspapers, El-Baradei, Hizbullah, Shaabollah, Facebook, the tuk-tuk, 0900, shantytowns , Kifaya, the coffee shops... and no end of new words, each of which deserves an article in its own right, thus demonstrating how hard it is to summarise 1,000 weeks in 1,000 words. It makes it easy to understand why it is always said that a week in politics -- and in journalism, too -- is an entire lifetime. Yet to look through the memory of the Weekly and the time it covered to review the more important events that took place in Egypt is to put oneself before two countries with the same image or two images of the same country: Egypt of the 1990s, and Egypt of 2010. It makes you marvel at the effect of time, which makes it seem like another, completely different country. So much so that a remarkable poet like Farouk Guweida should write "This country is no longer like my country" and a politician of Ahmed Ezz stature to speak with confidence and pride of the size of the achievement that has occurred in Egypt. There are those who see no point of resemblance between Egypt now and Egypt as it was, but there are those who insist, by contrast, that it has not moved forward an inch. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say would be that, while it changed, Egypt has not really changed. The population, for example, rose from just over 50 million to little over 80 million; some 30 million more mouths are now alive, not to mention all the implications in terms of providing them with education, medical care, housing and breadwinning opportunities. In the same way the political theatre has been transformed entirely, with pluralistic elections in which candidates competed with the president for the first time, and efforts have been made to reform the economy radically whose results people are still waiting for. In every direction, be that as it may, there have been positive and negative shifts. Perhaps the greater influence in Egypt and other countries is what globalisation created and what it implies for the speed of the unrestrained flow of information, opinions, ideas and people from one place to another. "These interactions," says the prominent thinker Sayed Yassine in an interview with the Weekly, "have created a universal awareness. With the spread of the Internet and mobile communications, Egypt was no exception to the norm when it entered the information society. And even though that category of the young who deal with the community of information is broadening day after day, the conditions necessary for what we aspire to have not been met, whether in relation to transparency or the freedom of exchanging information instantly and free of charge." Yassine cites three principal phenomena as characterising the last 20 years in Egypt. The first is what he calls "the reinvention of politics", with the appearance on the scene of new political powers that actively demand change at a time when the role of political parties, which he considers necessary for any change, has receded. Secondly, there is the emergence of civil society and its role in defending rights and freedoms -- reflecting in tides of protest and movements demanding social and economic rights. The third phenomenon is that the state has "tendered its resignation" from its censorial and productive functions, so that it no longer performs its role in protecting citizens and their basic rights, or implementing the law without discrimination. The physician-writer Mohamed El-Makhzangi, for his part, feels that society has been affected by what he calls "the psychology of crowdedness" and all that it implies in terms of environmental and social pollution: "Under circumstances of overpopulation, impulsive behaviour multiply, generosity and magnanimity drop. This imbalance is due in part to the state abandoning its role and prioritising profit as a value, which creates a wall separating a brutally rich class from a majority living in conditions of poverty." Makhzangi observes that the media and the independent press have played an important role in making society aware of the dangers at hand and opens the door to self-expression in a louder voice and in an unprecedented way. But the more important aspect of any policy to be applied, Makhzangi says, is for people to feel happiness. People should feel that the state is genuinely interested in justice, the spirit of the law and human rights. The greatest source of optimism is that the new generation of Egyptians is different, and is not -- like its predecessors -- the prisoner of ideology. Its thoughts are fresh and not moulded. "I have great hopes," he concludes, "that they will create something beautiful." Ismail Serageddin, director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, by contrast, spends more time on what he calls "great leaps" in the field of freedom of expression and the regime's openness to other opinions. "But at the same time there are those who appoint themselves an intellectual police, who try to prevent discussion of any issue that might appear sensitive, and want to impose on society what to read and what to watch. The most recent example is the court appeal to stop printing The Thousand and One Nights." Although he conceded to the Weekly that Egypt, in common with many states, has witnessed a widening of the gap separating rich from poor and a deterioration in the quality of education, nonetheless scientific and technological advance has gained new ground. Still, the gap between us and a fast changing international community is large, and this forces us to pay more attention to scientific culture and continually develop ourselves in order to be in a competitive position. There is much talk, besides, of unprecedented negative transformations in the Egyptian character that have resulted from the panting rhythm and greater pressures of life and breadwinning in recent years. So much so that an official study of the Cabinet's Future Studies Centre concludes that the traditional value structure among Egyptians has started to disintegrate in the absence of a sense of security and a regression in the notion of example and the value of learning, a tendency towards depression and escapism in the form of surface religiosity and notions of the unknown. This is not to mention passivity, agressiveness and creative approaches to corruption. Over all, there is no sense of belonging to the homeland -- something many see as the inevitable consequence of the state failing to perform its role in maintaining balance. For his part Gamal Abdel-Gawad, the head of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, does not accept the assumption that the state is no longer performing its role: "What we are seeing is probably a reflection of inefficiency in some departments, not a failure of the state to perform its role." Yet Abdel-Gawad agrees that society's confidence in the state has dropped: "Reform in recent years has always happened from top to bottom, with a decision from the state. The more pronounced positive development in my view is that the methodology of negotiation has replaced the mode of imposing will. The relevant parties -- the state and the political powers -- have begun to learn how to reach a compromise through dialogue." However, according to Abdel-Gawad, since the 1990s, Egypt has started to move towards becoming "a normal state" in the sense of the government organising as opposed to controlling society. The public is more mature, the regime more willing to respond to demands. *** The road to the future, in the opinion of Yassine and others, requires a strategic vision covering the next 20 years to which everyone should contribute by diagnosing the problems and confronting corruption as well as revising the role of the state in administering the economy and placing new policies to bridge the gap between classes. Whether the changes that have occurred since the 1990s are satisfactory, this discussion in itself implies that fresh air has entered through the windows, bearing with it transformations and reforms in politics and economics as well as evidence of mobility within society and among intellectuals. Throughout these developments the Weekly was present, an observant witness of how Egyptians have interacted with what is happening around them. Its task, as always, was to remain the chronicle of a people: their conditions, their ideas, their pulse. As far as it was able, over its 1,000 issue journey, it committed to the extraordinary duty of reflecting the image of Egypt without siding with the state's supporters or its opposition, the way any truly national newspaper should. In parallel, it presented the world and its issues with Egyptian eyes, employing a vision that sought to rectify the faulty eyesight of those who had adopted mistaken and stereotypical concepts in prejudiced and formulaic approaches that remained on the scene for many years without effective intervention. In this spirit and with an eye on the future and the constantly evolving world of media, this paper is currently contemplating an ambitious redesign. One thing is sure: each of the next 1,000 issues will take on its own challenges, posing questions and testing our professionalism and integrity. We have enough faith, however, to fulfil our promise of journalism worthy of the name. This alone will enable the Weekly to reach the shore safely, however rough the waters it navigates. *Editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly.
