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Author's name: Abdel Wahab Al-Aswani

Is the novelist a historian? A philosopher? A sociologist? An anthropologist, an opinion writer, a psychoanalyst, a behavioral analyst, someone interested in mythology, the legends of nations, the epics of peoples, and the biographies of their symbols? Or is he a priest who carries humankind's commandments from generation to generation? He is all of these, in addition to his gifted ability to create beauty, shape consciousness, and sharpen the conscience... I heard these words from my uncle, the great novelist, Mr. Abdel Wahab Al-Aswany, more than once, perhaps in different formulations, as he defines "the novelist." My assumption, which has become a certainty confirmed by evidence, is that he was describing himself. Although I find this description applicable to a few of humanity’s great immortal writers, it is most clearly applicable and most evident to Al-Aswani, with his unique ability to create his worlds, shape their details, and inject life’s blood into his characters, relying on a broad, solid, and diverse culture. Fate led him to its many contradictory sources since his birth in 1934 in an Arab tribal environment in the farthest reaches of the interior. His childhood and early youth were torn between that environment and the city of Alexandria in its cosmopolitan era, then his move to live in Cairo and other Arab capitals. He was accompanied throughout his life and travels by an insatiable appetite for serious reading, which made him gather history, geography, and the human extension between them in the palm of his hand, studying them, contemplating them, deducing from them, writing, and creating.

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