Word: egypts
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Some of Al Aswany's popularity undoubtedly stems from his delight in smashing social taboos. Apart from the barbs against Egypt's regime that flow from his characters' mouths, the author has expressed understanding, if not actual sympathy, for Islamic extremists, and has written explicitly about issues like homosexuality and abortion that had long been taboo in Arabic literature. One of the main characters in Yacoubian, for example, is the gay editor of a Cairo newspaper, who uses money to seduce a married Egyptian soldier desperate to feed his family. In Chicago, a female character visits a sex shop...
...part of that, so I am inside the battle. Dictatorship has an understandable fear of real culture as opposed to the state's culture. Once people are exposed to real culture, they will ask about their rights." He argues that authoritarianism is at the root of many of Egypt's social ills, including the spread of extremist Islam...
...Yacoubian Building, which sold some half a million copies and was adapted into a box-office hit starring Arab cinema's top actors, is a brilliant depiction of the troubles plaguing contemporary Egypt. The saga of the inhabitants of a downtown Cairo apartment building, it examines the historical, social and political vicissitudes that Al Aswany believes have left the country in a state of physical and moral ruin. One character, Zaki Bey, is the scion of an aristocratic clan, an Egyptian Romeo who uses his Yacoubian Building office for lecherous assignations, oblivious to the crumbling edifice around...
...novel displays Al Aswany's ability to portray in the most subtle, realistic manner the complex forces that shape such lives. With Chicago, he has produced a highly political diatribe against dictatorship, reflecting the rising calls for democracy in Egypt at the time he was writing it. The climax of the book unfolds with a scheme by Nagi, the medical student, and Salah, the professor, to stage a small protest during an official visit to the U.S. by the unnamed Egyptian President. Having been selected to give a short speech welcoming the President to Chicago, Salah intends to read...
...Aswany belongs to a young generation of Arab writers more concerned with domestic liberties than with fighting Egypt's old battles against colonialism or nursing the wounds of a humiliating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. A longtime political columnist for the opposition newspaper Al-Arabi, he joined the nonviolent Kifaya! (Enough!) movement in 2004. He has been harassed by security police, and Islamic radicals have publicly denounced him. But despite the outward pessimism in Yacoubian and Chicago, Al Aswany strives to be optimistic about his country's future. He believes some progress has been made...