Al Aswany: Drilling for The Truth

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If Al Aswany relishes crafting a good yarn — he spends months sketching every detail of his characters' lives and personalities before weaving them into his narratives — he is also zealous about the artist's role as social critic. Rarely has that burden seemed more important in the Middle East, with Al Aswany serving as a relatively lonely advocate of liberalism caught in a struggle against an entrenched authoritarian regime on one hand and a rising, chauvinistic Islamist movement on the other. "This is a battle for democracy," he explains during one in a series of interviews with TIME. "Writing is 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.

The 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 him. At the lower end of the social order are characters who reside in shacks on the building's rooftop; Taha is the earnest son of the building's doorman, and Busayna is a beautiful shopgirl, whose dream of marrying him is gradually crushed by his bleak financial prospects. In the novel's heartbreaking dénouement, Taha dies in a gun battle with police. He had become a radical Islamist, lured into a terrorist group after his hope of becoming a policeman himself was dashed because of his low social standing and lack of political connections.

The 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 a statement defending the right of Egyptians to freedom and democracy. But he chickens out, and later commits suicide. The scene is a disappointment to some Al Aswany fans, many of whom see his characters as real people harboring the hopes and frustrations of most Egyptians. Nonetheless, Chicago ends up as a powerful indictment of dictatorship and its corrosive effect on human dignity.

Although the story is fiction, Chicago is drawn from the two years that Al Aswany spent in the city during the mid-'80s while earning a dentistry degree from the University of Illinois. When he wasn't hitting the books, he would go out into the city — to a gay church, a black-pride organization, the Chicago Symphony — in search of American culture and ideas for a future novel. Nowadays, he could get by happily without his second income, but Al Aswany says he has no intention of giving up his dentistry practice, since filling cavities and performing root canals offers him priceless contact with ordinary people.

Al 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, thanks to the courageous efforts of Egyptian judges, teachers, journalists and bloggers in demanding greater freedoms. "Egypt is not the same country it was 10 years ago," he says, sitting down for a cigarette in his dental office after treating a patient one recent evening. "In politics, in literature, Egypt woke up."

The author resists any analysis of his writing, but he does not dispute that both of his novels end with a spark of hope. Yacoubian concludes with the hopefulness of Busayna's marriage — albeit to the dubious Zaki Bey. And Chicago ends with a similarly unexpected union. Perhaps this is Al Aswany's way of suggesting that Egypt, too, broken down as it may be, will continue its quest for renewal.