Obituary: (1933-2008) Professor , who passed away on Tuesday 15 January, possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt's modern history. He created a genre of writing that mixed patriotism, the immediacy of journalism and political erudition, to produce 16 volumes in which he recounts the history of Egypt using the archives of Al-Ahram. The 17th volume in the series will be published this week. In addition to this monumental undertaking Rizq also produced monographs on the history of Al-Ahram, the rule of Mohamed Ali and on Egypt's first lady. I was privileged to work with Rizq on the production of all three volumes, and was a long time fan of the full-page article that appeared weekly in Al-Ahram. The paper has a number of as yet unpublished articles by Rizq and so will continue with the weekly instalments in which he surveys the course of Egypt's recent history as reflected on the pages of Egypt's longest established newspaper. But Rizq was not only a historian and commentator. He was active in the Taba arbitration case and is known to have provided the jurors with original maps proving that the city was part of Egyptian sovereign territory. He was also a member of the Shura Council in addition to other national councils. He received the State Merit Award in 1955 and the Mubarak Award for Social Sciences in 2004. While historians have long differed over the date at which Egypt's modern history can be said to have started, with some saying it began with the Ottoman invasion of 1517, others with the French Campaign in 1798, Rizq was adamant it should be dated to 1805, the year Mohamed Ali came to power, insisting that "we mustn't set a date for our modern history that begins with foreign invasion". "We cannot separate the post-Pharaonic phase from the Arab phase or the modern one. We may be able to speak of a Pharaonic era, but it is much harder to speak of a Coptic era or an Islamic era," he once wrote, underlining his objection to attempts to impose a religious classification of history. Rizq's most recent endeavour was to supervise the production of two books due to be published by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the first about the Shura Council and the second a history of the People's Assembly. A keen observer of Egyptian journalism, Rizq described the recent squabbles within the Press Syndicate as "the birth pains... of a syndicate for seekers of trouble". It was a judgement backed up by the reading of more than a century's worth of back issues of Al-Ahram. A strong advocate of the right to expression, Rizq pointed out when the government of Abdel-Fattah Yehia Pasha was seeking to restrict personal freedoms its first act was to issue a law regulating the press. Ironically, the revolutionary regime that came to power in 1952 would later act in much the same way, in 1960 issuing its own set of regulations governing the publication of newspapers. Under Khedive Ismail journalists were banned from discussing politics, wrote Rizq. In the 1930s journalists often referred to their profession as Her Majesty, by which they meant that they were serving a goal that lay beyond partisan politics and business influences: it is a goal of which Rizq would almost certainly have approved. In his last article in Al-Ahram Rizq recalled the arrest of Ali Maher Pasha, an incident that drew much public interest at the time. It is one more example of an episode that still reverberates in Egypt's contemporary history though sadly the country has now lost one of its most erudite commentators, a man capable of drawing the lessons of the past and applying them to the present. Samir Sobhi
