Keeping Egypt’s memory alive

Nader Habib meets a historian devoted to preserving Egypt’s collective memory through the publication of a unique magazine

Just a few steps from the Nile in the Manial district of Cairo where history and authenticity seem to linger in the architecture of the buildings, I was on my way to meet a man who has devoted much of his life to documenting Egypt’s past in a distinctive way.

At first, I could not find the entrance to his building, even though I was standing directly in front of it. The entrance was hidden behind an iron gate that gave no indication that it led into an apartment building, while climbing plants covered much of the exterior. It was a scene that even a filmmaker might have struggled to recreate convincingly.

Unable to identify a clear entrance, I called my host for directions. He sent one of his assistants to open the gate and receive me. The entrance itself was narrow, leading to a tight, almost circular staircase crowded with cats.

History seemed to have taken up residence in the building as everything was old and silent. But once inside, I found myself in a room resembling an office, one of those spaces built in the past to receive guests without requiring them to enter the family’s living quarters. A few moments later, the assistant came to tell me that “the professor will be meeting you in his bedroom as he is bedridden.”

When I entered the room, I was immediately reminded of another influential cultural figure, the writer, journalist, artist, and translator Sobhi Aziz Al-Gayar, who was born in 1927. Before he had even reached the age of 14, Al-Gayar was struck by a debilitating illness that affected his spine and threatened both his life and mobility. Doctors at the time diagnosed it as acute rheumatism affecting the joints, and Al-Gayar spent nearly six decades of his life confined to his bed. But he filled those years with work that brought people together and gave them a great deal of pleasure.

My host on this occasion was Ahmed Rashad Mohamed Kamaly, better known as Ahmed Kamaly. “I am a historian. I publish the Ayyam Masriya magazine, and I specialise in historical fact-checking and reviewing. This kind of work is extremely rare in Egypt,” he said by way of beginning his interview with Al-Ahram Weekly.

“Because of the illness I have suffered from since 2013, my health has deteriorated to the point where I can no longer move without assistance, but I am still working from bed,” Kamaly said.

“The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has asked me to review material on its website. Prince Abbas Helmi has consulted me on a number of matters related to the Manial Palace and as chair of the Friends of the Mohamed Ali Palace Association. The National Organisation for Urban Harmony has also consulted me on matters related to historical documentation.”

“Friends ask me about photographs and historical information, which makes me happy,” he added.

Kamaly’s journey into history did not begin in an academic history department, as he had once hoped it might. Instead, circumstances took him to the Faculty of Law.

“I was born in January 1967. After finishing school, I enrolled in the Faculty of Law, which my father had chosen for me. At the time, I felt almost as if I was going crazy because I wanted to study history at the Faculty of Arts, but I did not get the grades required to enter the department,” he said.

“The only option was the History Department at the University of Beirut in Lebanon. But my father said that ‘if you study law, it will save you from needing any other degree, and you will find yourself in a completely different place.’ At the time, I did not understand what he meant. But eventually I discovered that law is a great field, even if when I began working in history, people were surprised that I was a law graduate,” he added.

“They could not understand why I had left the profession I had studied for and moved into another field.”

Kamaly’s professional journey was also shaped by difficult personal circumstances. “At one point I was married, but after my illness separation became the most appropriate choice. Not everyone has the ability to live with a sick person and care for them all the time,” he said.

AGAINST THE ODDS: “I am grateful to the friends who stood by me in an extraordinary and almost unbelievable way, even during a period when I had decided to stop working altogether,” Kamaly said.

“Moamena Kamel, a distinguished professor of pathology at Cairo University, called me and said that I was needed to continue because I preserve history and document it. Shee told me that whatever I needed, she and others would provide.”

“My friends began accompanying me to printing houses and production offices. They helped me send out issues of Ayyam Masriya and provided every kind of support that made it possible for me to continue working despite my illness.”

“What mattered to all of them was keeping the magazine alive, especially after the departure of its co-founders, artist Helmi Al-Touni and my partner Amr Ibrahim.” It was with these two co-founders that the story of Ayyam Masriya began, rooted in the library of Kamaly’s father and his own deep passion for history.

“I got together with my neighbour and university colleague Amr Ibrahim, who was also one of the top students at the Faculty of Law, and suggested that we produce a newsletter consisting entirely of information,” Kamaly said, describing the beginnings of the publication.

“We really liked the idea, and at first we produced the magazine on a typewriter. Then we developed it by adding photographs and expanding some of the sections.”

“Since it was only an experiment, we did not distribute it, producing the first issue in November 1995.” The library of Kamaly’s father proved invaluable, providing him with an enormous archive of newspapers and magazines, numbering in the tens of thousands, that could serve as a historical archive.

“Through that archive, we had the ability, if it was used properly, to educate an entire country,” Kamaly said. “What mattered was having the enthusiasm to present everything as if it were new, even if in reality it was old.”

The first issue of the magazine was eventually sold to the public for PT50. The story then took another turn with the involvement of novelist Youssef Al-Qaid, one of the great names of the Egyptian novel in recent decades, who said the publication needed a proper cover and someone with artistic expertise.

The encounter happened at publisher Dar Al-Hilal in Cairo, where Al-Qaid mentioned that Al-Touni, one of Egypt’s most influential illustrators and graphic designers, would be arriving soon and promised to recommend him.

“I was stunned,” Kamaly said. “I asked myself whether Helmi Al-Touni himself was going to work with us on a modest magazine that was trying to find a place among more established publications.”

The team had already prepared a proof copy of the second issue of the magazine and had devoted more attention to it than to the first. It contained a special feature on the unity between Egypt and Syria in the late 1950s, based on Syrian newspapers from 1958 that Kamaly had found preserved in his father’s library.

When Al-Touni arrived, Al-Qaid asked him if he could design the magazine cover as a gift and as a way to encourage the aspiring magazine.

When he saw the second issue, Al-Touni also said that famous writer and journalist Ahmed Bahaaeddin had always wished to produce something like it. In honour of Bahaaeddin’s memory, he said, he would design the cover for them. He created the cover of the second issue, personally writing the words Ayyam Masriya and drawing the accompanying motifs, doing all this work without charge.

The issue was then taken to the National Distribution Company, which made it available at numerous outlets. Orders eventually came from Gaza and as far afield as Geneva and other places. During their next meeting, Al-Touni asked Kamaly about the subject of the upcoming issue. It was to focus on what they described as the greatest celebration in history and the curse that befell those who took part in it: the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869.

Many of those who participated in the event later met difficult fates, Kamaly recalled, with some, like the Egyptian Khedive Ismail and the French emperor Napoleon III, being removed from their thrones, and others being executed. Al-Touni asked to see the issue so that he could design its cover as well.

The team asked him to become a permanent contributor. He gladly agreed and said he would continue designing the covers without payment, on the condition that the quality of the content would remain the same.

“Helmy Al-Touni was far more than a designer: he was a great example of patriotism and Arabism,” Kamaly said. Ayyam Masriya itself increasingly embraced an Arab outlook. Each issue included an article about Palestine, and on one occasion, the magazine published a three-dimensional map of Jerusalem. In its 15th issue, it published a photograph of the various factions taken by Jacqueline Khouri, then a journalist and senior editor at Al-Ahram.

He remembers another encounter with Al-Touni, after telling him that the magazine was becoming more popular and that significant profits might follow. In 1997, they reached an agreement with a Saudi national who was prepared to pay a substantial sum for an issue devoted to Saudi Arabia in the Egyptian press.

But Al-Touni wanted his name removed from the magazine’s masthead, saying “you are not a taxi that anyone who pays you gets a ride. You are a media organisation and not an advertising organisation. You should deal with institutions not individuals.”

“Perhaps someone hearing this story today would have a different opinion,” Kamaly said. “But at that moment I chose to follow Al-Touni’s advice.” He had come to understand that dealing with history was an extraordinary task and certainly not an easy one.

“When you write the truth, you put yourself at risk, and you need someone to protect you.

“Helmi Al-Touni was that protection, and he offered it with great affection,” Kamaly said. “Even after he had finished designing the magazine covers, he continued to personally follow the art direction and production.”

The magazine eventually expanded beyond periodicals into books, with Al-Touni designing their covers as well.

BOOKS: Kamaly recalls producing a book with the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Development Fund about the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

“I suggested that instead of simply producing a book about Mahfouz, we should produce one about Egypt at the time of his birth — in other words Egypt in 1911,” he said. “People are the children of their times. If we can understand more about that era, we might be able to understand the secret behind his genius.”

Kamaly said that he was surprised that people working in the cultural sector at that time seemed to be administrators with little connection to culture itself. They agreed to publish the book because Al-Touni would be designing the cover. They also purchased around 1,000 copies of the book, making it a success.

The project then attracted the attention of the director of the Naguib Mahfouz Museum in Cairo, who on the 20th anniversary of Mahfouz’s death asked Kamaly to consider creating something new. He said he had been impressed by the earlier book and was considering having it reprinted. Kamaly said that they had already featured the book in Ayyam Masriya and suggested that the magazine could serve as a promotional vehicle for it.

The book offered readers a picture of culture and education as well as news events and the arts in Egypt in 1911. “We studied Mahfouz’s novels and researched the society in which he grew up and the extent to which it influenced his writing,” Kamaly said. As the media landscape evolved, Ayyam Masriya also tried to keep pace, and the magazine then launched a website, an expensive undertaking at that time.

But Kamaly found that the site generated few returns, so the team turned to Facebook instead. “I found that much better than the website because I could see the number of followers directly and interact with them. Although engagement was weak at first, I began producing short films designed to correct various historical misconceptions. These films attracted large numbers of views, considering the nature of the material,” he said.

Even so, Kamaly believes that the new technologies demand something more if they are to generate large audiences. When they first considered creating a website for the magazine, the aim was to reach readers abroad. But one friend offered a different perspective.

“This is a wonderful magazine for Egyptians living abroad,” he told Kamaly. “It gives them an opportunity to feel the homeland physically through the paper it is printed on. If you turn it into an electronic publication, you will lose that value,” he said.

Following that advice, the team considered publishing the magazine half in Arabic and half in English, hoping that this would help improve its distribution abroad. But it has never been governed by a long-term publishing plan, something Kamaly considers one of its most difficult aspects.

“One of the things we faced was not having a long-term plan for the shape of future issues. Readers would often ask us about upcoming issues, even though we had not actually produced them at the time,” he said.

“When you choose to develop an idea, it may be feasible at that particular moment. But by the time you are ready to implement it, circumstances may have changed and the idea may no longer be possible. The idea is a child of its moment.”

Because Ayyam Masriya is not a periodical in the traditional sense, its publication schedule varies from one issue to the next. The issue marking the anniversary of the 23 July 1952 Revolution took six months to produce, for example, and involved a survey of newspapers published between May and July 1952, examining the most important articles and news stories of that period. The resulting issue ran to around 96 pages.

Its publication coincided with the death of Kamaly’s father, who had contributed an article about Manial’s role in the Revolution. The district had been home to the then heir to the throne, as well as members of the family of military leaders Mohamed Naguib and Anwar Al-Sadat, who, according to the article, went to a cinema in Manial to establish that he had been there on the night of the revolution.

“It was a very unusual article,” Kamaly said.

He was surprised when Amr Ibrahim spoke to Al-Touni and suggested that they place a photograph of Kamaly’s father on the front page as a tribute to the man who had supported the project financially and made his personal library available to them.

Today, Kamaly’s own surroundings continued to inspire ideas for new issues. Because he lives near the Manial health centre, he has considered producing an issue about public health, seeing it as another part of Egypt’s history.

Yet despite everything the magazine has published, Kamaly regrets the historical treasures he says he failed to record before they disappeared.

“I wish we could reprint the old issues because I believe many members of the younger generation have never seen them. I also deeply regret that I did not photograph the treasures of the Rawda Island before they were demolished,” he said.

“There was a building known as the Talaat Harb building, for example. Was it really owned by [the early 20th-century industrialist] Talaat Harb? I don’t know. Did he live there? I don’t know. I should have documented these things.”

The magazine has now published 70 issues, although some are not numbered. Kamaly explains that this goes back to advice from Al-Touni. “If you are working with an organisation and feel that they are going to put pressure on you in some way, consider that issue to be unnumbered,” he said.

As our conversation drew to a close, Kamaly spoke of something more personal than the history of the magazine: his desire to regain his place in the world of work.

“I am happy to have had this conversation with the Weekly and to have overcome the fear I had of meeting new people. This has encouraged me to return to my work with renewed passion,” he said.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 August, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.