Egyptian proverbs tend to be spot on, but when it comes to the saying saheb balein kaddab (he of two minds is a liar) — meaning that when you take on two things at the same time, you’ll likely fail at both — Alaa El-Aswany is one man who manages to give each of his passions its due.

Dentist by day, top novelist by night, El-Aswany found instant fame with his novel Omaret Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building, 2002), which has been turned into a movie, translated into 17 different languages and is currently being adapted as a TV serial.

Released in January, his eagerly awaited follow-up novel, Chicago, sold a record 25,000 copies during its first five weeks in stores.

So what’s the key to El-Aswany’s successful balancing act? The author answers with a proverb of his own: “There is an old saying that as time gets tighter, it becomes wider, and I believe very much in it, because time becomes valuable. My productivity is higher than a lot of my full-time writer friends.”

With no social life on weekdays, the writer and father of three takes two-and-a-half years to finish his novels. While he now spends less time at his clinic — he travels abroad at least once a month to oversee translations — he insists on keeping his clinic doors open.

“Many of my patients have finished their work with me and still come to visit me and talk about their issues,” says El-Aswany, adding that his work as a health professional helps him keep tabs on the news on the street.

Omar Mohsen

El-Aswany earned his masters in dentistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago, so the city was an obvious setting for his current novel. “I was lucky to go to Chicago, because Chicago is a very rich city, the richest city in the West. It also has a long history of attracting minorities, which gives it a unique formula that does not exist elsewhere.”

In Chicago, set after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States, El-Aswany presents cultural issues from the Arab world — Egypt in particular — against a Western backdrop, where a conflict of cultures becomes clearer.

“As long as we are living together, yes we do have problems, but they are still between us,” he explains. “When [an Arab] goes abroad, his cultural problems become clearer and stronger because he is carrying his culture alone in another society with a different culture.”

One issue that runs through the novel is the religious influence of salafi wahhabi — the state ideology of Saudi Arabia — that has affected many Egyptians in the past 30 years.

“A specific sector of us go with the salafi wahhabi direction of thought, and we always refer to 1,400-year-old books to solve issues in our daily lives,” says El-Aswany, who believes that Egyptians have halted their thinking process ever since.

El-Aswany sees two main factors behind the problems in Arab culture: religious extremism and political oppression, “which is a huge problem that has lead to extremism.”

All this cultural baggage is carried abroad, where El-Aswany says Arabs “have to make choices all the time. This creates problems because some choices are wrong — like the one Raafat Thabet, one of the novel’s characters, made when he decided to become totally American and forget his origins; it doesn’t work and problems arise.”

Shaimaa’ is another character who is forced to make a choice. A socially oppressed village girl in her mid-30s with average looks and no special feminine talents, she’s a smart student who takes a job as an assistant teacher at the Faculty of Medicine, thereby greatly reducing her chances of landing a husband.

“Men have issues — for a guy to marry a girl like that, he has to be at least a teacher at the Faculty of Medicine and so the sample she had to choose from is very limited,” says El-Aswany. “Any guy who wants to marry her also wants her to sit home and not work, and she doesn’t want to do that.”

Shaimaa goes to the US for her PhD and in Chicago, meets Tarek Hassib, an overly dedicated medical student who studies for 14 hours a day and, knowing very little about life, suffers from a number of psychological complexes.

The situation gets sticky as their sexual feelings arise and they become more liberated by their lives in a Western culture.

“Shaimaa’ begins questioning the culture she grew up in and re-evaluating whether it is right or wrong and thinking, ‘I have saved myself and didn’t get married while other girls played around and still got married. And does God judge Muslims in a way and Americans in another? Americans commit many sins; there are homosexuals and they drink and sleep around and yet God has given them many blessings and they are ruling the world,’ so she weakens, of course,” El-Aswany reveals. “But I sympathize with her — these are very human thoughts.”

Mohamed Salah also made a wrong decision. Years after moving to Chicago, the character starts to realize that leaving Egypt for the US was not the right choice. His lover’s parting words replay in his mind, calling him a coward for fleeing his problems.

“He got scared, it is normal. When he grew older he discovered that these words hurt him a lot and affected him severely,” El-Aswany explains.

Whether it’s Thabet, Shaimaa’ or Salah, El-Aswany’s characters will strike a chord with readers.

“[O]ne of the nice definitions of a novel is that it is a life that is similar to reality but deeper, more beautiful and more meaningful,” says El-Aswany. “So if you felt the characters and sympathized with them, if you felt the drama and the novel gave you a different vision and feelings that are not yours and made you live a life you haven’t actually lived but have experienced through the novel, then the novelist is successful.”

Although Chicago has sold like hot cakes and received critical acclaim, it hasn’t gone down well with more conservative readers.

“I expected this because [religiously conservative people’s] relationship with literature is almost nil, and they read with a very sensitive mind. One even sent me threatening emails each week about the veiled girl [Shaimaa’] who had a physical relationship,” recalls El-Aswany. “So by the third week I wrote him back, asking him ‘Why are you reading in the first place?’”

In response to the attacks, El-Aswany dedicated a page in El-Dostour newspaper to answer critics, “because they are all youth who are influenced by wrong thoughts.” Some of those who initially criticized the novel now attend El-Aswany’s weekly literary gathering.

El-Aswany also surveyed 20 men and 20 women who sent him complimentary letters on his novel, asking them if they thought the sexual scenes in the novel were too much. While all the women thought they were necessary to understand the events, five men thought that while it was fine for them to read the sexual details, they didn’t like their wives reading it.

“This is the protective mind; the husband imagines that his wife is blind and doesn’t know anything in the world, and this gives him a sense of relief — which is one of the cultural issues I was talking about; this is wrong,” says El-Aswany.

It is this same ‘protective mind’ that had the censorship authority request the homosexual character be written out of the TV adaptation of Omaret Yacoubian.

“The censorship authority doesn’t think that gays exist in Egypt, or in the world,” El-Aswany announces flippantly.

“I care about my job, which is a novelist, and my audience is the reader. When a reader tells me he read my novel and liked it, then I passed the test; the adaptation of the novel is not my job and I keep a distance from it. If the people doing the adaptation did a good job with it, like they have done with the movie, good for them; if not, then it’s their concern.” et