WHEN ALAA El Aswany writes, he writes without fear. He makes no compromises, a quality he says that gives his writing depth even in describing the seedy or sadistic side of human existence. The best-selling author who took the Arab literary establishment by storm with his critically acclaimed Imarat Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building) does not shy away from weaving sordid tales of political corruption, sexuality, and torture into his stories elements that could have potentially seen the book banned.

Yet El Aswanys debut novel, a tale of life in a downtown Cairo apartment building that delves into a mix of power, corruption, sex, exploitation, poverty and extremism managed to become one of the best-selling Arabic-language works of fiction in recent decades, receiving accolades for lucidly capturing the varied aspects of Egyptian life: straight, gay, rich, poor, powerful, powerless.

We have hit zero. The zero we received in the Mondial is a fair result, very fair. The Egyptian government should get a zero in all fields, not only in soccer, but in health and education, in democracy in everything, really.

I see literature as an expanse of freedom, he says. Literature should examine the areas that people dont talk about, to show us things we could be feeling but not seeing. Its function is to teach us we are different, that we should be forgiving, and that we should not look at human traits as being either wrong or right. The issue is more complex. For example, I tried to present the homosexual as a person. It is not something to make fun of or to look at with disgust, and not all evil is concentrated in him as a person. He is a human being who has a different lifestyle. He may be happy with it or he may not.

A novelists work is similar to researching a PhD thesis, says El Aswany, who frequented a number of small bars, taking note of the atmosphere that he recreates so colorfully in The Yacoubian Building. One day, he says, the police came.

The police officer came to me and said, What brought you here? You are a doctor, recalls El Aswany, whose national ID card identifies his vocation. You should go to the Meridien to drink a beer. You shouldnt come here. These places are full of thieves. El Aswany eventually got a wasta at the police station, so when he was at a bar during a raid, the officers would know him, wave, and leave him alone.

Born to well-known writer and lawyer Abbas El Aswany, who was awarded the state prize in literature two decades ago, Alaa credits his father with instilling in him a powerful love for writing and literature.

Ashraf Talaat/Egypt Today – 2) Best-selling author of The Yacoubian Building Alaa El Aswany writes only three hours a day and spends the rest of his time at his dental clinic.

For 30 years until his death in 1977, the first floor office in the Yacoubian Building housed the elder El Aswanys law practice. When his law partner died, the heirs sold their half. Later, Alaa El Aswanys dental clinic would share the space with a shirtmaker and an accountant before moving to an office on Garden Citys Diwan Street.

A single episode inspired the idea behind the novel. El Aswany was walking in Garden City when he saw an old building being demolished to make way for a garage. The building was being torn down in longitudinal sections, making its many separate rooms visible. Those rooms had life. There was someone studying, someone who was in love with the girl next door, a newlyweds first apartment, recalls El Aswany. It had people who lived and people who died. The idea stayed with him for eight years until he finally sat down and began writing the novel in 1998.

The 47-year-old novelist is now the author of four literary works, the most influential being The Yacoubian Building, which has gone through five printings in less than two years the first completely sold out in six weeks. He published his first collection of short stories in 1990. His latest, Niran Sadiqa (Friendly Fire), is a collection of 10 stories that candidly and provocatively explore what it means to be Egyptian.

El Aswany thought of majoring in literature, but concluded that being a novelist in Egypt wouldnt earn him a living. After all, even Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz remained a civil servant until his retirement. Instead, El Aswany enrolled in the faculty of dentistry at Cairo University.

In his early 20s, he married a colleague from the faculty, but the relationship soon broke up. He remarried at age 37 when he felt he was more mature. He has a son, Seif, now an electronics major at AUC, from his first marriage, and two girls, Mae and Nada, from his second.

El Aswany was later accepted to a masters program in dentistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago. he spent three years starting in 1985 studying, traveling and exploring American culture and society. Although he still practices dentistry, he writes for three hours early each morning.

Egypt deserves better than this. It deserves a true democracy, that there be human rights, that our people have the democratic right to choose their rulers. It deserves a system that allows the talented to reach their natural place. Anyone with ability in Egypt is pushed aside.

While the novel is a few years old now, El Aswany still receives calls and letters from readers around the world. He is often invited to participate in forums, and has been interviewed on tens of television programs. The film rights to The Yacoubian Building have been sold, and screenwriter Wahid Hamid has already penned the script. An English translation of The Yacoubian Building is also due out in the fall from the American University in Cairo Press, and French and Italian translations are in the works.

So how many copies of this best-selling novel have actually been sold?

Only God knows the answer to that question, El Aswany says with a shrug. Publishers, not keen on doling out royalties to their authors, keep the actual sales figures a secret. They give you a number. You multiply that number by two or five depending on your trust in the publisher. If you trust your publisher very much, you only multiply that number by two. But honestly, I dont trust the publisher very much, so I multiply by five.

The first run of The Yacoubian Building was printed by Merit Publishing House. The two sides had a falling out because he wanted a low-cost edition to garner a wider readership. Not everyone can afford to purchase a book for LE 20, he argues. So he took his book to the Madbouly Publishers, which has handled the remaining printings. Much to his dismay, they also sold the book for LE 20, exactly as Merit had done.

The Yacoubian Building earned El Aswany only about LE 4,500. And the publisher, using his own numbers, has made at least LE 150,000, explains El Aswany. It is not the fault of the publisher or me. It is the fault of the system that fails to protect writers in Egypt. Some publishers are surprised that you want money at all. Fiction seldom sells as well or creates a stir; writers are granted little, and that includes greats like Mahfouz.

The novels success may have a lot to do with El Aswanys writing style. He was always against hard-to-understand allegory and symbolism. I was mindful that the novel should be understood by the reader. This does not mean it is superficial, but that it has several levels of understanding, says El Aswany. My writing is not above the reader. I respect the ordinary reader. And what made the great writers is the ordinary reader. What made Hemingway and Tolstoy and Chekhov are not the people sitting in salons.

Along with authoring novels and short stories, he has been writing monthly political articles in the Nasserist Al-Arabi for the past three years. Before that he was with Al-Ahali and Al-Shaab, where he was responsible for the literary page, all this before the infamous campaign the paper waged against the Ministry of Cultures printing of Walima li Ashab Al-Bahr (Banquet for Seaweed). Although Im not a member of any political party, I formed a relationship with the editors of these party newspapers so that they would give me the space to write independently.

But personally, El Aswany is revolted by the system of inherited power and institutionalized corruption that is corroding Egyptian life. Culture is no exception. We are talking about a system that needs to be changed completely, he says candidly. It has reached a point where we have reached zero. The zero we received in the Mondial is a fair result, very fair, not only in the Mondial, but in everything. That zero really should not be given to the Egyptians, it should be given to the Egyptian government. The Egyptian government should get a zero in all fields, not only in soccer, but in health and education, in democracy, and in everything really.

Egypt deserves better than this. It deserves a true democracy, it deserves that there be human rights, it deserves that people have the democratic right to chose their rulers, to choose their representatives, it deserves a system that allows those who are talented and those who struggle to reach their natural place. Anyone with ability in Egypt is pushed aside.

It is written a lot in the West that true democracy will bring the Islamist trend. If this happens and if a state has the Islamists adhere to the rules of democracy so that they rule for a specified period of time, I see this as being very beneficial. People now see the Islamists as being something holy. When the Islamists rule, people will realize that they are ordinary people. They have people who are good, and they have people who are crooks, who take commissions. They have an opportunity to think, and they can change them.

Literature is definitely political at times. But can it effect social change?

Not directly, believes El Aswany, arguing that political writing is more straightforward. Literature gives a human model. It makes the issue greater than the political problem. The political problem is a part of the literary panorama, but it isnt everything.

He believes the government jeopardized literary expression when it handed judicial mandate to Al-Azhar. Now, sheikhs can tour bookshops, collect editions they find religiously objectionable, and have them confiscated on the spot, he explains. The author would then have to file a lawsuit to overturn the ban and wait years. During this period the book will remain unavailable. The sheikhs of Al-Azhar have the right to forbid practically any writer from writing, adds El Aswany.

The government thought it very clever to create a duel between secular intellectuals and Islamists so the issue of reform could be forgotten, El Aswany says matter-of-factly. It is a political issue. It has nothing to do with religion or governments fear of Islam. It is meant to divert attention away from the lack of democracy in Egypt.

Educated at a French school, El Aswany was exposed to the West at a young age. A part of me is essentially liberal. My father was a great writer and artist, and our house was very liberal. I had a liberal upbringing. Whoever wanted to pray, prayed; whoever wanted to drink, drank; whoever wanted to fast, fasted.

El Aswany converses fluently in English, French and Spanish. His primary and secondary schooling was at the secular Lycée Franais in Bab El-Louk, where he learned French along with Arabic and English. He remembers attending a very diverse school, with Jewish students and supervisors.

When he lived in America, he became aware of the importance of Spanish. As a lover of literature, he found that learning Spanish would allow him to read Latin American storytelling in the original. When he returned to Egypt, he took language courses at the Spanish Cultural Center and excelled. He was later sent on a grant to study Spanish civilization in Spain.

El Aswanys experiences were also enriched by life in America. He would pick up The Chicago Reader and browse the weekend listings. Each week, he would explore a different venue.

He went to a church for homosexuals, founded by a homosexual priest who saw no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity. Creating your own church? Thats America, he smiles. He attended meetings of an association calling for the liberation of Puerto Rico, met people devoted to the struggle, and learned about the tumultuous history of this commonwealth. He also attended concerts, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the ballet.

One incident he will never forget: He was walking on campus when his entire masters thesis was blown away by a gust of wind this was before the age of word processing. On that cold and windy day, all the cars screeched to a halt. The drivers got out and, along with passersby, collected the floating pages of his research.

His desire and love for writing prompted him to take the decisions hes made, like coming back to Egypt.

I had the opportunity to stay. I decided to return for the sake of writing, says El Aswany. Egypt is unique in its complex social and political tapestry, which is the writers pen.

He also received numerous offers, owing to his American education, to work in the Gulf at impressive salaries. He turned them down, convinced that it would come at the expense of a literary career. He described it as being like a fishing net. Once you go, and are lured by lots of money, you wont be able to return. Following the overwhelming acclaim of The Yacoubian Building, he was offered huge sums to pen screenplays, but he felt it was yet another snare.

I can spend three years writing a novel and not make a dime. But you cant do that if you spend four months writing a scenario which earns you a quarter of a million pounds. Its his love of writing novels and short stories that keeps him going.

El Aswanys other narratives have struck a chord. The protagonist in one of Friendly Fires stories, Allazi Iqtaraba wa Raa (He Who Did and Saw) is an angry and jobless youth fed up with what is happening in Egypt, and disgusted by talk of the greatness of Egypts pharoanic past and its 7,000 years of civilization. Another story in Friendly Fire, Gamayat Muntazir al-Zaeem (The Awaiting-the-Leader Association), tells about a band of people from the old Wafd Party who are living in the past, awaiting the return of their leader, Mostafa al-Nahas.

El Aswany keeps his professional and literary worlds separate. When I am in the clinic, I am a dentist. I dont talk about literature. When I am outside the clinic, I am a writer who has nothing to do with dentistry.

Why the strict divide?

Imagine your ear is hurting you so you go to a doctor, and instead of talking to you about your ailment, he tells you he plays music and has composed a piano sonata that very morning, says El Aswany. You will lose your trust in your doctor. He may be a great musician, but he will ruin your ear. et