Al-Ahram

History

Al-Ahram was founded in Alexandria in 1876{{cite journal|author=Caryle Murphy|title=The Future of Print|journal=The Majalla|date=18 December 2012

Its headquarters was in Alexandria until November 1899 when it was moved to Cairo. The newspaper was distributed in Egypt and the Levant. The religious innovators Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani were early writers of the newspaper. Upon the death of Beshara Takla, Daud Barakat, a Lebanese journalist, was named editor of the daily in 1901. In the early 1920s Muhib Al Din Al Khatib, a Syrian journalist, served as the editor of the paper.{{cite journal|author=Amal N. Ghazal|title=Power, Arabism and Islam in the Writings of Muhib al-Din al-Khatib in al-Fath

Under Heikal

President Gamal Abdel Nasser made his friend Mohamed Hassanein Heikal editor-in-chief of al-Ahram in 1957, and the paper gained semi-official status. On 24 May 1960, it was nationalized when Nasser passed a law eliminating the ownership of private newspapers. Under Nasser, al-Ahram became an internationally respected paper. It moved to a new headquarters in Bulaq in the 1960s.

Heikal was known for high standard of production quality and contacted Linotype in 1965 seeking to acquire state-of-the-art Elektron linecastes.

The circulation of the paper was between 45,000 and 50,000 copies in 1937 whereas it was 90,000 copies in 1947. In 1976 the paper had a circulation of 520,000 copies, making it the second-most read daily in Egypt after Al Akhbar.

Profile and editions

Al-Ahram daily is the flagship of what is now the Al-Ahram publishing house, the largest in Egypt. ''Al-Ahram'''s headquarters is in Boulaq, Cairo. Its content was controlled by the Egyptian Ministry of Information.

The pan-Arab Arabic-language edition of the paper, called Al Ahram Al Arabiya, is destined for readers in the Arab World and the Egyptian expatriates in Arab countries. It is published daily in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and distributed in Egypt and Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Arabic weekly, Al Ahram Al Arabi, which was launched in 1997 is another publication of the publishing house.

An international Arabic-language edition called Al Ahram al Duwali has been published daily in London since 1984. It is printed in both London and Paris and is distributed throughout Europe, USA, Canada and Egypt.

Two foreign-language weekly versions are also produced: the English Al-Ahram Weekly (founded in 1991) and the French Al-Ahram Hebdo.

Al-Ahram produces a continually updated news website in the English language at english.ahram.org.e.g., called Ahram Online. It also has an Arabic news website which was the 20th mostly visited website for 2010 in the MENA region. It was named as the most popular news portal in the Arab world in the period from 31 August 2011 to 31 August 2012 by Forbes Middle East.

Ownership and government influence

• Fekry Abaza
• Shahid Alam
• Khalid Amayreh
• Azmi Bishara
• Hamid Dabashi
• Sabah Hamamou
• Mohamed Hassanein Heikal served as editor-in-chief
• Taha Hussein
• Yusuf Idris
• Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature
• Anis Mansour
• Joseph Massad
• Salama Moussa
• Ihsan Abdel Quddous
• Edward Said
• Ahdaf Soueif

References

Bibliography

• Merrill, John C. and Harold A. Fisher. The world's great dailies: profiles of fifty newspapers (1980) pp 51–58

References

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