CAIRO, Egypt -- If you want to meet the Arab world's best-selling author, you have make an appointment between the checkups and teeth whitenings at Alaa al-Aswany's dental practice.The man who wrote "The Yacoubian Building," which broke sales records in Egypt and the Arab world before spawning the country's biggest-budget movie ever, no longer needs his day job to help him pay the bills. But for al-Aswany, dentistry and novel writing are linked, the former helping him find and develop the characters for the latter.So whenever he's not circling the globe on a book tour, he shows up for work at his private clinic in the upscale Garden City neighbourhood of Cairo and takes mental notes as he cleans the teeth of the countrymen he writes so unsparingly about."Both medicine and literature are dealing with the same issue: the human being," the genial 50-year-old said in an interview in the operating theater of his two-room clinic. He listed other medical professionals, including Anton Chekhov and Emile Zola, who doubled as successful novelists. "If I like, I can quit dentistry, but I will not. My clinic is my window through which I follow Egyptian society."The Egypt he sees through that window is a collapsing one."The Yacoubian Building," named after the real-life building in Cairo where the book's fictional characters reside, enthralled and shocked readers with its portrayal of a corrupt and crumbling country where poor young women are forced into prostitution and where angry young men desperately embrace violent Islam. Seats in the country's parliament are bought and sold in business deals, and police officers habitually use torture as a means of interrogation.It's often hard to separate the book's dark portrayal of his country from al-Aswany's own politics. A founding member of Kifaya, a pro-democracy movement that's organized street demonstrations against the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak, the Egypt in al-Aswany's book is one held back by a corrupt and thuggish government.He insists that he doesn't hate, or even dislike, Egypt, but he sees his country's government as a tooth that's decayed beyond repair. The only solution, he says, is to yank it out so that another might have a chance to grow in healthy.His most recent novel, "Chicago," deals with many of the same themes found in his previous book. Set at the University of Illinois, where he studied dentistry in the 1980s, the book follows Egyptians living in a paranoid United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.Though the topic and the setting perhaps hit slightly less close to home for most in the Arab world than "The Yacoubian Building," "Chicago" has already gained notoriety as the book that finally knocked his previous work off the No. 1 shelf at bookstores in Egypt after nearly four years at the top with around 500,000 copies sold.Like its predecessor, "Chicago" is popular with Arab readers because it smashes through every taboo it can find. There's more barely veiled criticism of Mubarak and his security services, radical Islamists who are again portrayed with understanding, if not exactly sympathy, and -- rarest of all in this part of the world -- plenty of sex.For al-Aswany, sex is just another way his characters express themselves. The scandalized reaction some of the scenes elicit is more proof to him that something's gone awry in the Arab and Muslim world. He blames such prudishness on the rise of the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam across the region over the past few decades, something he speaks of with the same disdain he heaps on the Egyptian government.Though he writes in Arabic and for an Arabic readership, al-Aswany's success has allowed him to play a part in another conflict as well. At last count, "The Yacoubian Building" had been translated into more than two-dozen languages and was reportedly a fixture on the bedside table of Karen Hughes, the woman President Bush charged with improving relations between America and the Muslim world.The author, who speaks affectionately of the United States though not of its current leaders, believes his novels have a role to play in what some call the "clash of civilizations" -- a term he personally abhors -- between Islam and the West. But books, he warns, can only do so much. "To change the situation, you have to practice politics directly."But, he says, "I'm actually very optimistic. I believe Egypt is very, very close to a big change. A very positive change."In the meantime, he's not planning to give up his day job.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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