AT 82, DR. MURSI Saad el-Din still insists on walking a lady to the door and opening it for her. The charming smile that starts in his liquid gray eyes and ends on his lips seems to never leave his face. Not that age matters for Dr. Mursi: He’s an evergreen. “I’m over 80, but I don’t feel it,” he says. “I’ve managed to keep the child in me alive.”

As our seasoned photo editor prepares to take another shot, Dr. Mursi light-heartedly asks if we’d like one with his eyes closed.

“Did you ever try as a child to see what you looked like when you were asleep?” he asks. “We used to squint in front of the mirror and try to see ourselves through our lashes. How silly! Why not take a picture of ourselves with our eyes closed?” he laughs.

It’s exactly that spirit that has earned Dr. Mursi life-long friendships throughout the various careers he has had since graduating from Cairo University’s English literature department in 1943. Few know the number and value of these friendships better than his reporters: Having Dr. Mursi’s name on our masthead as editor-in-chief opens doors, helping us win difficult-to-get interviews from people who inevitably start off our discussions with, “So, how is Dr. Mursi?” and end them with an anecdote or two and “Please send him our love.”

Dr. Esmat Abdel-Meguid, former secretary-general of the Arab League, once regaled me with a particularly colorful anecdote, I tell Dr. Mursi.

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Mursi smiles. “I worked with Dr. Esmat. We were very young at the time. I was the secretary of the Egyptian Institute in London when we first met. It’s funny, you know. Esmat got his PhD from France and spent his whole life studying in French, but his first posting was to England,” he chuckles.

Courtesy Dr. Mursi Saad El-Din As the first, and until recently only, official spokesman for an Egyptian president, Dr. Mursi worked closely with President Anwar Sadat. This photograph was taken at Sadat’s residence in Giza.

Dr. Mursi’s own career began with a brief stint as a journalist with the Egyptian Gazette, after which he was posted to England for 12 years. In London, he won the hearts of his British counterparts and sent home to the local press frequent reviews of new English-language titles, becoming one of the most prolific book reviewers of his time. He was rewarded in 1995 for his lifetime service to Anglo-Egyptian relations when Queen Elizabeth II ordered him invested as a Commander of the British Empire.

He smiles when I observe that his stint as a foreign book reviewer was merely the first in a career full of firsts that made him one of the most imitated men in the national media. Among them: He was the first cultural attaché ever posted to an Egyptian embassy. The first translator of contemporary Arabic literature into English. The first (and, until two months ago, only) spokesman for an Egyptian president (Sadat, in Dr. Mursi’s case). The first director of the modern State Information Service. The architect of the first governmental programs focusing on the development of children. The founder, with lifelong friend Youssef El-Sibaie, of the Afro-Asian PEN Club. A prolific author of children’s books. A columnist for Al-Ahram.

And, of course, Dr. Mursi is the first and only professional editor-in-chief of Egypt Today, itself the first English-language magazine in post-Revolutionary Egypt. The list could go on ad infinitum. Masha’a Allah.

Maverick that he is, Dr. Mursi isn’t afraid to turn his back on something he pioneered when he feels the imitators taking over. “I used to host a show on Nile TV called Open Forum, and all of a sudden everybody started imitating it,” he says. “Their English was really bad, the programs were lackluster, so I stopped my show. When I was asked why, I cited a poem by William Butler. The gist of it is: ‘I sewed my coat and decorated it, but when people started imitating it, I decided to walk naked.’

“My friends thought it was a harsh thing to say. But I meant it. I am always happy to look for new things to do, just as children do,” he says.

Dr. Mursi and his wife with Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Dr. Mursi’s interest in children never waned despite the careers he has juggled. He hopes that one day Egyptian children will read for fun.

“Some parents aren’t educated enough: They prefer television to reading, so their children turn out the same. In England, they give a child books as presents instead of chocolates. In my time, we used to have a library hour at school every week, just to familiarize us with the way books look, feel and smell. We also had a free reading list every year, in English, French and Arabic. At the end of the year, we would have a competition the prizes were also books,” he says.

Dr. Mursi has written two plays for children, scripted 53 episodes of a program called Children in the United Nations, and 15.5 hours of shows featuring stories from around the world. The book closest to his heart, though, is Hafidaty Wa Ana (My Granddaughter and I), in which he talks about how he raised his granddaughter Menna until the age of seven.

How does he write for children?

“I put myself in a child’s shoes” he says, “That’s why people say there’s something child-like about me. There is a child inside each of us, and the important thing is to preserve it.”

Dr. Mursi shares a laugh with the late Hosni Guindi, editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, after being invested as a Commander of the British Empire in 1995.

A short-story writer and a poet, Dr. Mursi has always believed in the necessity of good parenting. It was his own upbringing that has had the most profound effect on his diverse interests. “I was born in a reading family and we had books all around us. My father died while getting a book from the library. I was in London at the time. There is a saying about soldiers, ‘He died with his boots on,’ and my father died with his book in his arms. He was a great physicist who wrote a lovely book about Al-Hassan ibn Al-Haytham. He was also a great teacher,” says Dr. Mursi.

His recent articles on fatherhood, which ran in his weekly column in Al-Ahram newspaper last month, brought tears to many eyes. “People told me they cried when they read my editorials. I told them maybe it’s because I was crying when I wrote them,” he says.

But it’s hard to imagine the ever-smiling Dr. Mursi in tears. He is, after all, the paragon of optimism. I wasn’t surprised when I found out that the topic of his doctoral dissertation was the linguistics of humor. “It was a comparative study between humor in Egypt and in England. I arrived at the conclusion that humor stems from society, which is why what makes an Englishman laugh is not what makes an Egyptian laugh,” he remembers.

It was during Dr. Mursi’s years as director of the State Information Service that Egypt Today got its first publishing permit.

“At the time, the publication was a 12-page bulletin in black and white. When I retired in 1981, Bill [the late William Harrison, founding publisher of this magazine] offered me the position of editor-in-chief. We moved around Garden City a couple of times before ending up on the Corniche, and then we moved to 24 Syria St. in Mohandiseen. Throughout the years we tried to introduce new things. First a few colored pages, then more, until it became what it is today. Many people tried to buy the magazine over the years, but I’m glad they didn’t succeed,” he says, shaking his head.

Despite his inclination toward arts and letters, Dr. Mursi’s brush with politics was unavoidable. Like most people of his generation, his interest in politics started very early in 1946 during his London years, to be precise.

“When the Labour Party assumed power in England in 1946,” he recalls, “it gave India its independence. We saw this as a chance for Egypt to gain its independence as well, so we produced a pamphlet titled Egypt and the Labour Party and distributed it to members of the House of Commons.”

On his return from England, two months before the French-British-Israeli assault on Port Said, Dr. Mursi was summoned to meet the chief-of-staff of the Egyptian Army.

“They sent me someone from the military police. I was scared, of course, but it turned out they needed to appoint me as a censor. Can you imagine me as a censor?” he says incredulously. He explains that at times of war, we need to guard information leaving the country. “Despite everything I actually enjoyed it. I started what I called ‘open censorship.’ Before, journalists used to write a story and send it to the censors, who would strike out a large portion of it and then send it abroad. Most of the journalists worked for [wires], which paid by the word, and their, say, 100-word story suddenly became 50 and they lost half their commission. So I began by talking to journalists and explaining what areas were unacceptable, then allowing them to change their pieces before sending them.”

Dr. Mursi’s finesse kick-started lifelong friendships with many foreign correspondents.

“I was censor during the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, so when I became head of the State Information Service, these friendships helped a lot. We always managed to have favorable stories about Egypt. I don’t want to say it is not the case now, but I remember when I left my post in 1981, a group of foreign correspondents came to me and said, ‘We used to send these favorable reports for two reasons: Sadat and you. Sadat has been killed and you are no longer here, so don’t expect the same kind of stories’,” he says.

Working with Sadat was an “exceptional time” for Dr. Mursi, who was known to be one of the president’s favorites. He acted as the president’s spokesman in difficult times including the Camp David negotiations. Oddly enough, it’s the one subject about which the normally talkative man would rather not speak.

“During Sadat’s time, the press used to run after us. Someone once wrote that the difference between Nasser and Sadat was that Nasser shunned media while Sadat went after it. I said, ‘No, we didn’t chase the media; we got daily requests for interviews with Sadat from the most important journalists of the time.’ But I don’t like to compare eras. Each has its own conditions, be they social, political, etc., etc.,” he says.

Dr. Mursi is reluctant to divulge what went on behind the closed doors of Camp David, but is quick to point out the need to rewrite modern history.

“When people say history will tell, I say, ‘No, it never will.’ Remember the story of the four blind men who were asked to describe an elephant? Each of them touched one part of the animal and described it. They were only able to tell what it really looked like when they put all their accounts together.

“It is the same in history. Every person has his own point of view and to get to the truth you must put them all together. Unfortunately we don’t have a single book which recounts the true history of Egypt. You’d find one historian saying Khedive Ismail and Mohammed Ali Pasha were thieves who robbed Egypt clean; and another who claims they introduced the enlightenment.

“It’s the same with Sadat. He tried to introduce democracy,” he says, “but we weren’t ready for it.”  et