Youssef M. Ibrahim

On an afternoon in 1958, a 14-year-old Egyptian boy walked into a Cairo theater to see the film "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing," in which William Holden played the role of a foreign correspondent covering a war for an important American newspaper. By the time Youssef Ibrahim came out, struck by the glamour of what he had seen, he had made up his mind—he, too, would some day be doing exactly the same thing as the hero of the movie. It was an improbable ambition for him, of course. At the time, he could hardly even speak English, much less write it.

Nonetheless, 21 years later, there he was on a Teheran street, diving for cover under a parked car as shooting broke out around him while he was reporting on the Iranian revolution for The New York Times. A year later he was at the front in eastern Iraq, trapped in an Iraqi military position as an Iranian tank rumbled towards it with guns blazing. None of it seemed that much different from what William Holden had been doing on the screen during that long-ago afternoon. For this reason, Mr. Ibrahim sometimes had to give himself the proverbial pinch to see if he was awake. As he puts it: "I kept asking myself: is it really me doing this?"

The Energy Beat

Today, Youssef Ibrahim is a U.S. citizen and an award-winning correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, based in New York. By all reckoning, he is the only first-generation Arab immigrant who has a major job on a top American newspaper.

Now in his fourth year with the Journal, Mr. Ibrahim is primarily responsible for his paper's coverage of developments in international energy. This means frequent travel abroad to interview officials and other experts in this field, as well as to report on meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was for a series of perceptive articles on OPEC's deliberations during 1983 that he received the prestigious George Polk award, given annually by the Overseas Press Club of New York. He has also, recently, become the recipient of the John K. Evans award, given by the International Association of Energy Economists.

Mr. Ibrahim does much more than just write about energy, however. "Covering the oil of the Middle East means covering its politics, too," he says. He frequently visits a Middle East country for several weeks at a time, to do in-depth reporting on political, social, financial and other developments. This year, he has already made such visits to Egypt and Iraq. In 1983, he was the only American journalist, he believes, to have been permitted to visit Iran during the course of the year.

The fact that he is an American journalist who comes from the same background and culture as the people he interviews has its advantages, of course. It often creates a sense of confidence, and his native Arabic comes in handy when he is meeting with Arab officials who are not able to conduct a sophisticated interview in English. Mr. Ibrahim cites as an example the interview he had with Muammar Qadhafi in a tent on the Libyan desert a few years ago. "His English is not good, and because he was with someone he thought of as an Arab rather than an American and whom he could relax with, he chatted from midnight to dawn," Mr. Ibrahim says. He notes, however, that there are some officials who can't quite figure him out, and "would be more comfortable talking to an American correspondent named 'John Smith."'

Sensitive to the Twists

Mr. Ibrahim believes that he has, ironically, done his best work in a non-Arab country of the Middle East: Iran. "I feel very comfortable in the culture—sensitive to its twists and turns—and because I'm part of it they feel more comfortable with me," he says. "The officials are less on their guard than they would be with the average U.S. correspondent." Although he does not speak Farsi, he finds that most officials who cannot handle English can converse with him in Arabic: "they learn it from studying the Koran."

Mr. Ibrahim's third language is French—which he learned far sooner than he did English. In fact, the first twelve years of his schooling, in Cairo, were mostly in French. By the time he arrived at the American University in Cairo (AUC), in 1963, he had picked up a lot of spoken English from the movies—"I was a movie freak," he says—but AUC would not admit him as a freshman until he had taken a semester of intensive work in the language.

During his four years at AUC, Mr. Ibrahim spent three of the summers working in the foreign news section of the Cairo newspaper Al Akhbar, and translated wire service copy from English into Arabic. During the fourth summer, he wrote stories for Al Ahram, as a general assignment reporter. Those who knew him at the time say his Arabic prose was excellent.

In 1969, Mr. Ibrahim received a fellowship to study at the Columbia School of Journalism, from which he graduated with an M.A. in 1970. He spent one and a half years as a news clerk and news assistant at The New York Times, then four years at Chase World Information as a reporter and assistant editor for the newsletter, MidEast Markets. He rejoined the Times in 1977, and at various times was based in Teheran, Kuwait and London.