Robert Fisk’s World: When I look at the Pyramids, I wonder why I tire of Egypt

Author of Books including a biography of Prophet Muhammad, the former editor of Al Ahram, Muhammad Hassnain Heylak is alive (MashaAllah) ... I must confess my ignorance...ok over to Bob ~~~t

I took a trip up the motorway towards Alexandria this week from the mad city of Cairo to see old Mohamed Hussainein Heikal.
I have to say "old" in quotation marks because Mohamed is still a young man and I hope he lives for at least another 10 years. This would make him 96 years years old, three years older than my First World War father and five years older than the current president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who will be 81 in May. Every time I say goodbye to Mohamed in Egypt, I pray that I will see him again, and his driver. (He is from Aswan and he is, of course, darker skinned and also called Mohamed.) If Allah wills, as we must all say here.

I said the same when I got on the plane back to Beirut this week – the best thing about Cairo is an aircraft with a cedar tree painted on the tail flying to Lebanon – and he agreed. I will not tell you what Mohamed (Heikal) and I talked about because the last time we did this, I dumped him in a load of problems and I do not want to do this again. (Be sure, he will be reading this as you, reader, read this.)

But we did discuss death and age and I told him that there are only three great Egyptians: the pharaoh Ramses, Nasser, and Mohamed Hussainein Heikal. He led me into the garden of his farm in the Egyptian delta and we sat amid the bougainvillaea and agreed that we had never been in the Middle East in a worse or a more dangerous war. I also pointed out to him that since he already lived in paradise, there was no point in dying.