Ayman Al-Sayyad

Ayman Al-Sayyad
Al-Sayyad (June 2012)
Born	Ayman Amin Al-Sayyad March 17, 1956 Al-Santa, Al-Gharbiah, Egypt
Residence	Cairo, Egypt
Alma mater	Cairo University
Occupation	Journalist, columnist
Notable credit(s)	"Weghat Nazar" Editor in Chief, Senior Advisor to the 1st elected Egyptian President (2012)
Website	http://www.shorouknews.com/columns/ayman-al-sayyad

Ayman Al-Sayyad (Arabic: أيمن الصياد, born March 17, 1956) is an Egyptian journalist, writer, magazine editor and political commentator. He has been editor of Weghat Nazar Periodical since 2000, and has a weekly column in Al Shorouk Newspaper. In addition to his journalistic career, on August 27, 2012, Al-Sayyad was chosen as a senior advisor to the first elected Egyptian president after the January 25 uprising, Mohammed Morsi. He had earlier declined a ministerial post as Minister of Information, to keep his editorial independence.

Al-Sayyad resigned from the Presidential Advisory Board in protest over the constitutional draft of November 2012, which he considered a key failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to govern inclusively. He first announced his resignation through his Twitter account, and later wrote an open letter to then-president Morsi, which has created wide controversy after it ran in Al-Shorouk newspaper.

Following the 2011 uprisings in the Arab Middle East, Al-Sayyad devoted much of his writing and time to the issue of transitional justice and has been since considered an expert on the topic. He has provided consultancy in the field of transitional justice to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and, in 2013, he was appointed by the Egyptian ministry of Justice as a member of the four-member-committee to work on transitional justice in Egypt.

Al-Sayyad was born in the Nile Delta town, Al-Santa, Egypt, to which his father had moved to from the neighbouring village-town of Balkim in the mid 1940s. He later moved, first to Tanta as a college student at to study medicine, and afterwards to Cairo, where he graduated as valedictorian from Cairo University with a BA in Broadcast Media Journalism in 1983. He began his journalistic career as a Cairo correspondent at the Pan-Arab London-based weekly magazine “Al-Majalla”, which he later served as its Cairo-Bureau Chief between 1991 and 1998. In 1995, Al-Sayyad was awarded The Ali & Othman Hafiz Award for Best Story in the Arab Press.

Despite the polarized political climate post Arab Spring in the region, Al-Sayyad’s writing has been noted to have maintained a readership from opposite ends of the political spectrum. In his writing, lectures and interviews, he repeatedly argues that “there is too much McCarthyism in the media nowadays, while what is badly needed is fairness.” his interest in dialogue and open discussion has also been noted in his work as an editor. In 2009, he established Weghat Nazar Dialogues, a culture initiative that conducts seminars and consultations around key political and development issues in the region.