Gratitude to the Cairo University faculty.

Thank you for stewarding Egypt's flagship university, a campus of a quarter million dreams across the Nile from Cairo, and for keeping its doors open to the whole nation.

Thank you for teaching mathematics at Cairo University for decades while defending academic freedom and your family with a persistence the whole world came to witness. Your courage is itself a lesson.

Thank you for dedicating your science to a schistosomiasis vaccine for the two hundred million people the disease still touches, and for showing Egyptian women scientists a path to the world stage.

Thank you for co-founding the Women and Memory Forum and for recovering the voices of Arab women across a century of history, then helping write rights and freedoms into Egypt's 2014 constitution.

Thank you for carrying Cairo University's economics into the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN's 2030 agenda, and for always returning to the classroom where it began.

Thank you for decades of teaching political science with independence and for writing about Egypt's public life with a candour that has never been the easy choice.

Thank you for leading Cairo University's digs at Saqqara for two decades, being lowered by crane into shafts in your seventies, and bringing the tombs of Ramses II's generals and treasurers back into the light.