Though Sid-Ahmed, one of Al-Ahram’s most respected columnists and a pillar of Le Monde diplomatique, passed away in February, his influence continues. At a Press Syndicate memorial service, Sid-Ahmed’s lifelong friend, the inveterate journalist and one-time Nasser confidant Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, said, “You notice here that I am avoiding the use of the past tense [when speaking of Sid-Ahmed]. It is because I see Mohamed Sid-Ahmed in a perpetual state of dialectic debate with his surroundings, himself, his friends, his world and his time. Despite what our friends have said about Mohamed Sid-Ahmed in the past weeks, be it in writing or verbally, I believe he was not a rebel, but a committed person. The very essence of this commitment was his search for truth, something he spent a lifetime doing. He would get ahead sometimes and sometimes would go forth with others, always searching with surprising enthusiasm, with the overwhelming passion of a heart filled with the innocence of a child and a mind from which the pessimism of the philosopher peers.”

Born on November 29, 1928, Sid-Ahmed spent his youth as a member of Egypt’s budding communist organizations, where he was an increasingly prominent figure between 1945 and 1964. His prolific writings include the best-selling When the Guns Fall Silent, which has been translated into six languages. Anuoar Abdel Malek, a life-long friend of the writer, describes this work as “a prophetic take on the future of Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Having lived such a rich and productive life, Sid-Ahmed was continually urged by his friends to write his memoirs. They would, his friends said, be an exceptionally valuable insider’s take on the rise of Egypt’s communist organizations. Although he never got around to it, in March Al-Qahira newspaper, the capital-city weekly edited by Salah Eissa, began serializing an extensive interview a Harvard PhD candidate had conducted with Sid-Ahmed.

Although it is only an oral recollection of events, it is the next best thing to having the master writer pen it himself.

Sid-Ahmed was born to an aristocratic family: His uncle was the infamous Ismail Sidki Pasha, prime minister of Egypt during the nationalist struggle against King Fouad and the British. “My uncle was more imperialistic than the king and defended the palace more than the king realized,” he said of his famous relative. Sid-Ahmed was introduced to Marxism at a very early age through his French tutor, Rene Granier. As the teacher who coached Sid-Ahmed for his French baccalaureate test, Granier explained literature from a Marxist perspective. “I got a very poor score on the test: 10 out of 20,” the writer recalled.

It was through this teacher that Sid-Ahmed met his friend Abdel Malek and in 1946 became a member of Eskra (Russian for ‘flame’), one of the earliest communist organizations. In his farewell to Sid-Ahmed, Abdel Malek writes: “Mohamed soon became one of the brightest stars of the International Committee of the House and a dedicated member of a movement that was striving to put the nation on the road to cultural renaissance with the assistance of young revolutionaries struggling for national liberation and people’s democracy.”

Sharing his memories with the Harvard interviewer, Sid-Ahmed pointed out an interesting feature of the early communist groups: They were formed largely by foreigners living in Egypt, most of whom were Jewish. The secret organization Sid-Ahmed joined was led by Haleel Schwartz. “His theory was that Marxist thought in a country like Egypt was transferred from foreign intellectuals to Egyptian intellectuals, and then to Egyptian workers,” he said. “When I review what happened, I realize that a lot of progress took place regarding steps one and two, but there was no progress in step three.”

Sid-Ahmed remembered the earlier newsletters the secret organizations produced, which depended heavily on contributions from foreigners and Egyptian intellectuals: “You could have thought it was written in Nicaragua. The reader felt its writers were foreign students. It was funny: a secret Egyptian organization producing a newsletter written in English and French, with some portions in Arabic. It was read only by those members who could speak English and French.”

Looking back, Sid-Ahmed could see clearly that despite everything, “Eskra contributed in building characters that could weather difficulties and make sacrifices idealistically. When I left the country [at the age of 19] and came back, I lived for two years in a single room, not leaving it once. In 1949-50, I severed all contact with my family and lived a kind of organized and tough life — so much so that when I later went to prison, I felt a kind of freedom.”

Sid-Ahmed’s first stint in prison was brief, as Nasser released all political prisoners following the Revolution. But the writer would later be back behind bars for a much longer stint. In 1959, he was sentenced to 10 years for communist agitation, but was freed in 1964 when Nasser struck a deal with Khrushchev.

“Despite everything, the communists pinned high hopes on Abdel Nasser,” he said. “This is why they could not understand the violent treatment they were subjected to in prisons between 1959 and 1964, and especially during the first two years. Why all the cruelty and the beatings? Even today [years later] we cannot understand it.”

In the interview, Sid-Ahmed talks about the sometimes confusing alliances and fights among communist organizations and about the formation of now-obsolete entities like such as Hadetto and the Egyptian Communist Organization, among others. To the idealist seeking answers, Marxism and communism were just ways to organize the world and make sense of it, he s “Communism had to answer my quest for order.”

It was this quest that later prompted Sid-Ahmed to pursue a PhD in mathematics, the most ordered of sciences.

Then came Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, which played havoc with order and the emotions of generations, causing Sid-Ahmed to rethink his whole communist worldview.

“The ’67 defeat posed questions regarding the meaning of my sacrifices, of my family and my education all for a political path that suddenly seemed like it was built on an unsteady foundation. The issue of the relationship with Israel became a priority over the questions of communism and the fate of the Egyptian leftist movement. Without my realizing it, the book that spoke for my real issues became After the Guns Fall Silent.”

Looking back on the experience, Sid-Ahmed was able to pinpoint certain characteristics he believed common to all Egyptian political movements to this day. Underpinning all of them, he would say, was the fact that they always begin with members of the elite or the petit bourgeoisie.

“The elite game became one of the most important factors in modern Egyptian history. Maybe it goes back to the days of the Wafd,” he said, “but I think it may explain many political phenomena, such as the class structure of communist organizations and political movements. It could also explain how Marxists had so much influence on Egypt without ever creating a public movement.”

Though the master himself no longer walks among us, Sid-Ahmed’s contributions survive to inspire future generations. A believer in the role of the intellectual, the renowned political thinker wrote in 2003, “Arab intellectuals would do well to engage in some soul-searching of their own. Clearly, traditional approaches are no longer adequate to meet the new challenges facing our part of the world, and the time has come to search for innovative formulas that can help stop us sinking further into the quagmire.” et