By Hani Shukrallah , Al-Ahram Weekly's founding chief-editor , died a year ago this week, after a long and painful battle with illness. It was only upon his death that the paper's readers were provided with a glimpse of this truly exceptional human being, journalist and leader. So profound and intense was the grief, shock and sense of loss among us -- his friends and colleagues at the paper -- that we disregarded what we were fully aware would have been his wishes (and possibly inspired some of our readers' disfavour as well) by dedicating substantial expanses of two issues of the Weekly to eulogising him, including all of one front page. Members of both the Weekly 's staff and that of its mother organisation, Al-Ahram, as well as a large number of our most prominent contributors, took part in paying homage to this intensely unassuming man, someone who would blush deeply at the mildest of praise. We must leave it to others to judge whether we might have been too emotionally self-indulgent in doing so. Yet we like to think that in paying homage to , we were also paying homage to what we believe are some of the best -- albeit increasingly rare -- aspects of contemporary Egyptian and Arab values, culture and society. In a way, we were also making a statement of editorial intent, of what we, under 's ever so gentle leadership, set out to do via the Weekly, and hope to have managed to achieve with some measure of success. In celebrating the memory of our editor, we were also celebrating tolerance at a time of rising bigotry and intolerance; reason, when fanaticism, prejudice and narrow-mindedness is running riot; personal courage and professional integrity, under conditions in which sycophancy, nepotism and venality seem the order of the day. These values, which deeply held and lived by, he relayed to others -- not by hectoring or sermonising -- but by force of example and gentle persuasion. And against all odds, it seemed to work. At the time, we knew full well that in 's death, something very rare and very precious had been lost. But we may also have been saying, implicitly and without being fully aware we were doing so, that rare as they are, the values he exemplified can survive, carve out a place for themselves, and even thrive; that swimming against the tide is both possible and fruitful. There may, even, have been an element of desperation in this -- the feeling that with 's loss, the values he stood for, and worked tirelessly to instill in the newspaper he founded and led for over 13 years, were now under renewed threat, more vulnerable to the inhospitable climate that had always surrounded them. One year on, and in hindsight, another aspect of the Weekly 's homage to its founding editor seems to leap out of those past issues of the paper: the realisation that in a part of the world where people in authority are heaped with praise while they wield power, but are then quickly forgotten, or even maligned, as soon as they lose it, 's one moment in the limelight -- the one occasion on which he was the subject of a tremendous outpouring of praise -- was upon his death, when he had ceased to have any power or authority to wield. This is also testimony to the kind of human being, journalist and leader that he was. How far we have succeeded during this past year in keeping 's legacy alive is a matter for our readers to judge. His gentle spirit remains very much with us, however; and certainly, we've tried. With his wife, Moushira, and his daughter, Yasmine, we continue to share the loss, and the loving memory. : A tribute
