I was the youngest member of that department when I joined in 2000. That was when I first met Ustaz Samir.
In a 15-minute meeting he tested me, asking about my personality, my studies, and my qualifications before giving me a copy of the Weekly and asking me to comment on its contents. The result was that I would be hired to work in the Layout Department. But wanting me to learn from older colleagues, he did not let me use the computers until I had mastered certain skills. The tasks I was assigned were boring, but I quickly realised they gave me the opportunity to pick up my colleagues’ unique abilities.
When our late founding editor-in-chief Hosny Guindy wanted to financially reward me, he consulted with Ustaz Samir, who approved of the idea on condition that it should not be too generous. He himself told me this, years later, explaining that he did not want me to be spoiled. That was the first lesson he taught me: that work mattered more than money.
For a long time, Ustaz Samir treated me like his personal assistant. He relied on me to organise his office, which though no larger than four square metres was a press institution unto itself. I sorted the papers and books by subject and date, so that when he asked for something, I could instantly find it, and this made him very happy. He started teaching me how to put together books as well as newspapers, a task for which he had a magical penchant. One scene in particular comes to mind.
In the presence of Ustaz Hosni, who always consulted with him — when it was about a weighty issue, they would go into Ustaz Samir’s little office and close the door, and when it was about a more casual one, they would speak openly in the layout room — Ustaz Samir is putting together the newspaper, the mock-ups set out in front of him, marking out frames for the images with a pencil and sending me to the photocopier to make smaller or larger copies of them to fit the frames. Once the page was perfect, he passed it onto a colleague to reproduce on the computer.
Samir Sobhi treated us like his own children, with love and appreciation, turning the department into a solid, close-knit family. He made the layout department, with its diverse ideas and skills, like a family. He had a famous saying, “each one of you should be able to act as an editor-in-chief.” What he meant was that each member of the department — Galal Nassar, Hani Mustafa, Mahmoud Bakr, Ayman George, Khaled Al-Ghamri, Nesmahar Sayed, Ahmed Kamal, Ahmed Sultan, and myself — should maintain the highest skill set imaginable.
I never saw Ustaz Samir miss a day of work. He was always present, energetic, and joyful. When he wrote, his pen flowed gracefully, and he thought of himself as a journalist, not just a designer. I had the opportunity to collaborate with him on the opinion pages of the daily Al-Ahram and on the book Al-Ahram: The Diary of Contemporary Life by historian Younan Labib Rizk as well as on his own books.
The year the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Ustaz Samir stopped coming into the office, but the decision was made by the department — we were concerned for his health — and he only complied reluctantly. His health quickly deteriorated, confining him to the household, where we visited him at fairly regular intervals. We saw him as a father figure, and we missed not just his expertise but also his pleasantness and incredible humour.
He had remarkable powers of recall, remembering the day of the death of president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, of Al-Ahram’s legendary editor-in-chief Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, and of his friend and fellow layout director Maher Al-Dahabi, with whom he spearheaded a renaissance in that art and a time during which the page designer became as significant as the editor-in-chief. Even though he was no longer at the office or involved in the work, it felt as though he was watching over us on a day-to-day basis.
He was often in touch to discuss the state of the press and political and social issues, and our conversations always ended with him giving me ideas for stories to write or suggestions for developing the look or organisation of the newspaper. He would inspect his copy every week to evaluate it and identify flaws and how to avoid them in future. He loved the layout team deeply, and he had much affection for everyone at the Weekly.
During our last conversation, I had a premonition that this might be the last time we talked. His tone was different, as if he was saying goodbye. It was chilling, and I immediately tried to organise a visit with Hani Mustafa but sadly that never came to pass.
Ustaz Samir is survived by his wife Ikhlas Moussa, daughter Maggie, and son Yasser.
***
Samir Sobhi was born in Helwan on 7 March 1937. He was one of the first graduates of the Journalism Department at Cairo University and joined Al-Ahram at a young age. He helped to found the Friday edition launched in 1958, and he developed a strong connection with Heikal, in whose small office in the old Al-Ahram building on Mazloum Street in Downtown Cairo, where the printing press was on the ground floor and the editorial office on the upper floor, he could frequently be seen. They would maintain a strong relationship even after Heikal left Al-Ahram in 1974.
He worked with celebrated figures such as Fahmi Howeidi, Sami Riyad, Samira Ghabrial, Ahmed Bahgat, and Sanaa Mansour. Salah Montasser was his mentor, Salah Galal his boss. It was Hisham Tawfik Bahri who insisted that Sobhi join him in the Layout Department, something Sobhi himself was reluctant to do since he cherished editorial work, which he continued to do alongside layout for several months, earning double the standard salary of LE15 per month.
Soon he found himself working with Maamoun Abu Shusha, later a famous broadcaster, and Kamal Malakh. Bahri was so pleased with his performance that he told him his editorial work would have to stop but he could go on earning LE30. He would never stop writing, however.
The Typesetting Department used old machines that assembled the material in lead lines, Sobhi recalled in an interview, and the pages would be read upside down, a skill he mastered. After the nationalisation of the press in 1960, Heikal began to plan the newspaper’s new headquarters. Bahri led a team around certain Western countries to see how state-of-the-art newspapers operated, and innovations were adopted until the first computer arrived at Al-Ahram. Sobhi recalled how, unlike the presses which were operated by blue-collar employees, white-collar young men came to operate the new machines. He was the youngest person at Arab League conferences on adapting the Arabic script to the new technology.
It was in this context that the calligrapher who created the famous Al-Ahram logo, professor Adli, created special typefaces used exclusively by Al-Ahram for five years. Headlines no longer had to be written by hand. The machines were later gathered in a museum at Al-Ahram headquarters, which president Hosni Mubarak himself inaugurated.
“I remember explaining the old and new machines to him, telling him how they first assembled the written material letter by letter, then line by line, until it could be done page by page,” Sobhi said. “He asked me what happened next, and I quickly replied that the whole newspaper would be printed at once, and he put his hand on my shoulder. I happily remembered that moment when I saw it come true.”
Through his work in layout and design, Sobhi developed strong relationships with some of the country’s greatest authors including Tawfik Al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idriss, and Lotfi Al-Kholi, as well as artists like Youssef Francis, Makram Henein, and Salah Taher.
After Bahri was involved in a car accident, Heikal relied on Sobhi and A-Dahabi, sending them abroad to see printing presses, visit newspapers, and learn how to operate the latest technology. Sobhi travelled all around the world. Under former chairman of the board Ibrahim Nafei and Abdallah Abdel-Bari, he visited some 30 countries including the US to learn about the industry, and on his return he called for starting paper factories in Egypt. It was a plan Nafei seriously considered, but it ultimately proved untenable because of the lack of locally grown wood.
His design philosophy said that preparing the page for layout was more important than the layout itself. Text and images had to be selected and a concept developed for their presentation; then the designer’s creative skill determined how to carry this out. Sobhi paid attention to ratios, always asking what should be enlarged and what reduced in relation not just to the visual appearance of the page but also to its content. The designer’s job is to make sure the reader will read the first three paragraphs whether or not they finish the story.
Galal Nassar, a former editor-in-chief of the Weekly, remembers being approached by Sobhi while still an intern in the editorial hall of the daily Al-Ahram in 1990. Requesting a meeting in his office, Sobhi informed him that Al-Ahram was about to launch a weekly newspaper in English and that he had been selected to be part of the project. The first issue appeared on Thursday, 28 February 1991.
When Nafei announced the decision to issue Al-Ahram Weekly, he entrusted Hosny Guindy with the task of founding and editing it. The founding team included Sobhi, Mahmoud Mourad, Mohamed Salmawy, Morsi Saad El-Din, Hassan Fouad, Bahgat Badi, Mona Anis, Jill Kamel, Sofy Tharwat, Faiza Hassan, Wadi Kirollos, and Mamdouh Al-Gohari. Later, Hani Shukrallah, along with colleagues of various nationalities, joined. Opinion writers including Heikal, Mahfouz, Mohamed Sayed Ahmed, Iqbal Ahmed, Salama Ahmed Salama, Clovis Maqdoud, Mohamed Al-Sayed Said, Abdel-Wahab Al-Meseiri, Anwar Abdel-Malik, Naif Hawatmeh, and Azmi Bishara also made their mark.
Despite his decades in the profession, Sobhi remained humble, constantly pursuing information and gaining experience even if it came from someone his children’s age. He played a significant role in the careers of many journalists, maintaining continuous communication and interaction in a cycle of influences. His goal was to enrich journalistic work, which he never saw himself as being outside. As well as being a pillar of the Weekly, he also participated in producing the evening edition of Al-Ahram, where he instituted the “Big Child” page, and championed revisiting history through the press in the Egyptian Affairs section.
His books document his experience and ideas, always focused on the theory and practice of journalism. They include Press in Print, The Secrets of Newspapers, The Newspaperman, The Corridors of Journalism, Life on Paper, Press Sketchbook, The Journalist’s Handbook, A Journalistic Perspective on Arabic Type and News from Drumming to Satellites.
Samir Sobhi may no longer be with us in body, but what he left in the hearts of his students is a living testament to a life lived nobly and a career of the highest order. He will live on in the memories of his students and admirers.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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