Born in Cairo, Egypt, he counted Abdel Nasser among his grandparents. His family were wealthy wheat merchants in the Nile delta. Mohamed the eldest son in his family, which included three other sisters, was trained to manage the business. However he sought a valuable degree course education at the respected American University in Cairo. During the Second World War, the graduate Heikal commenced a career in journalism at the British controlled and funded "Egyptian Gazette", which he edited from 1943. The journal's contributors included English writers George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell. Throughout his career he was a literary critic of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak's military regimes, which he perceived as having departed from Nasser's original nationalist dream.