Ahmed Aboul Gheit

Born in Heliopolis in Cairo on 12 June 1942,[5] Aboul Gheit was originally from the city of Port Said. He studied business at Ain Shams University, Cairo.

Aboul Gheit joined the diplomatic corps in 1965 after completing university, and rose through the ranks of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, occupying diplomatic positions in Rome, Nicosia, Moscow and New York. He participated in negotiations in 1978 of the Camp David Accords, which led to the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. In 1999, he was appointed Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations, before being recalled to Cairo in 2004 to take the lead in diplomacy.

Aboul Gheit started his career as Third Secretary at the Embassy of Cyprus. Later he was First Secretary for Egypt's Ambassador to the United Nations, Political Consultant at the Egyptian Embassy in the Soviet Union in 1984, and Ambassador of Egypt to Italy, Macedonia and San Marino. In 1999 he was the head of Egypt's permanent delegation to the United Nations.[6]

Aboul Gheit served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt from 11 July 2004 to 6 March 2011. In December 2005, he began mediating the Chad-Sudan conflict. During the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy in 2006, he said "this was a very unfortunate statement and it is a statement that shows that there is a lack of understanding of real Islam. And because of this we are hopeful that such statements and such positions would not be stated in order to not allow tension and distrust and recriminations to brew between the Muslim as well as the west."[7] On 26 December 2010, Aboul Gheit opened the first Egyptian consulate outside Baghdad in the northern city of Erbil in a one-day visit to Iraq, where he also held talks with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.[8]

After the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011, he ceased to be Foreign Affairs Minister on 6 March 2011, after which he devoted himself to writing his memoirs.

• Egypt's Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: My Testimony, Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 2019
• Witness to War and Peace: Egypt, the October War, and Beyond, Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 2018