From Khrushchev to Sadat, many world leaders have felt the venom of Mohamed Hasseinein Heikel's acerbic commentary. Robert Fisk has an audience with the great Egyptian writer

The cigar. I can never imagine Egypt's greatest journalist - indeed, the Middle East's most famous scribe - without the haze of blue smoke from his Havana moving past his lean, powerful, mischievous face.

The adviser of Gamal Abdul Nasser, once editor of Al-Ahram - in the days when it was a great Arab newspaper, rather than the government mouthpiece it has become - Mohamed Hasseinein Heikel is the author of some of the most stylishly written historical works on Middle East history, as well as the archivist of the private papers of Nasser himself. "Acerbic" is how Heikel's friends like to call his bitter criticism of the present Egyptian regime. Devastating might be a better word. I can almost see The Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - who reads The Independent - sighing as he reads the next paragraph.

"Our President Mubarak lives in a world of fantasy at Sharm el-Sheikh," Heikel says. "Let us face it, that man was never adjusted to politics. He started to be a politician at the age of 55 when Sadat made him vice president before he was assassinated. Yes, Mubarak was a very good pilot" - he was commander of the Egyptian air force - "but to start off as a politician at the age of 55, that takes a lot of work. His original dream was to have been an ambassador, to be among the "excellencies". Now it's been 25 years he's been president - he's nearly 80 - and he still can't take the burdens of state." I remind Heikel that, shortly before he was assassinated at a military parade in Cairo, Sadat locked him up as a danger to the state and that when the new President Mubarak released him, Heikel was unstoppable in his praise of the man he now condemns. I had found Heikel after his release from prison, closeted with his family in a bedroom of the Meridien Hotel, thin and wasted, his clothes hanging from him after weeks in darkened cells, held alongside Islamists (who impressed him) and thieves.

Mubarak had been a shining light to him then, the symbol of a new Egypt, the man who had freed him from captivity. "At that time, I though he [Mubarak] had learnt a lesson," Heikel says. "I thought that because he had been beside Sadat when he was assassinated, he would have appreciated something. But more than anything else, it taught him 'security'."

Indeed it did. Just round the corner from Heikel's Nileside apartment - the carpets, the prints on the wall, the brocaded furniture, the carefully arranged flowers and the photographs of Heikel with Khrushchev and a host of other world alumni, suggest that history has not been unkind to Heikel - there is a street demonstration by two dozen Egyptians. They are members of the Kefaya (Enough!) movement - who are demanding an end to the state of emergency in Egypt and the president's rule and Mubarak's apparent desire to hand power, Caliph-like, to his own son Gamal, and new electoral laws which will deprive the Muslim Brothers of parliamentary protection - and they are outnumbered by at least 300 black-uniformed security police.

While President George Bush continues to believe that Egypt is becoming more democratic, the new legislation approved by less than a third of the electorate is in effect transferring the "state of emergency" (a condition beloved of all Arab dictators) into ordinary and unalterable law. Egypt is not a happy place.

"There is a state of polarisation," Heikel continues. "Between the rich and the poor, between revolutionaries and conservatives, between the government and the people. This thing is tearing through the Arab world. When the boys in the universities learn to use computers, they will end at the mosque.

"There is a sea between the authorities and the people - this is the wide sea which has opened. There is no wind now - but when the wind starts ..."

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