Alaa al-Aswani’s The Yacoubian Building describes a corrupt, unfair Egypt by following the lives of the residents of the Yacoubian building. More than being a captivating and enchanting novel, The Yacoubian Building delves into uncomfortable and ugly truths about life in modern Egypt and addresses subjects widely considered to be taboo in traditional Egyptian society. These subjects include sexuality, homosexuality, corruption, violence, and a host of other social problems. The Yacoubian building houses residents from all walks of life, rich and poor. The book is the unifying factor between the different social strata of Egyptian society.

The Yacoubian building itself brings a great deal of character to the novel. When it was built in the 1920s, the building was an elegant gem in the city and housed the wealthy and sophisticated. However, the building underwent considerable change in the years that followed that era until the 1990s, when the novel opens. The large, spacious apartments in the house remained, but a new community developed on the roof. Rooms that were originally used for storage and laundry were turned into tiny living units. In the Yacoubian building, the rich live below and the poor live above, a change from the normal depictions of rich living above and far removed from the poor. Though the inside of the house is still fairly sophisticated and rich, the outside is broken down and tarnished. All this, along with the store on the house’s ground floor, makes the Yacoubian house one where many different layers of society meet and interact daily. This provides an ideal setting to chronicle social history and analyze social interactions. Al-Aswani chronicles this social history and these interactions by analyzing the symbolism and role of the house itself as well as the lives of its residents.

The first resident I will look at in detail is Taha el Shazli, the son of the doorkeeper. Taha’s greatest ambition since youth was to become a policeman and he worked all his life to achieve that goal. The only thing standing in his way was one question asked of him in an interview: “Your father – what’s his profession?” Upon answering this question with the statement that his father is a doorkeeper, Taha’s dreams are broken and he learns that hard work, perseverance, and ability are not most important but rather money and connections. Pushing on, Taha enrolls in university classes, at first choosing not to become depressed and despairing. However, it seems that his path is pre-determined to be an unsuccessful, uphill battle that ends in a downhill slide that would lead him to Islamic radicalism and, eventually, violence. Taha’s life is plagued by unfortunate events: police beat and humiliate him, disillusioning him and shaking up his ideals about Egyptian society and state. In other words, al-Aswani seems to imply that society and the state beat and shape Taha into what he becomes, though his potential was so much more.

Taha’s girlfriend Busayna is also affected by increasingly corrupt conditions of society. While Taha’s experience was one that dealt with money and livelihood, Busayna’s experience dealt with the way that women are treated by the men in society. Busayna is told that if she wants to retain her job, she must let her boss touch her body as he wishes. Though she fights back initially, she eventually gives in so that she may keep her job. This power that her boss holds over her affects the way that Busayna looks at the worth of her life as part of Egyptian society, essentially degrading the value of her life.

Another prototype of the social decay that the novel is reeks of is the tall and elegant, Mercedes-driving, evil drug dealer Hagg Azzam. Hagg Azzam campaigns for a seat in the People’s Assembly, hoping that this will increase his power in society, and wins. Perpetually under the disguise of a pious honest man, Hagg Azzam is afflicted with nightly wet dreams, mistreats his secret second wife, forces her to have abortions, and covertly continues his activities as a drug dealer. However, in a further depiction of political corruptness and dirty tricks, Azzam doesn’t realize that he has, in a way, sold himself to those who helped him get the position. He who scams and abuses his power is even subjected to the corruption of Egyptian politics. Another example is the homosexual newspaper editor Hatim Rasheed and his married lover Abduh, and the pulls of money, guilt, sin, and pleasure that define their relationship. Another character, Zaki Bey, is obsessed with sex and slowly tries to take hold of parts of the roof of the Yacoubian building.

Corruption and hunger for power, both over one’s own life and over others, are uniting themes between all these characters, despite their differing walks of life and backgrounds. The corruption is prevalent not only in distinct areas of Egyptian life but in many: personal, political, educational, sexual, and religious. These categories cover all aspects of everyday life, and thus corruption and moral decay are everywhere in these Egyptians’ lives. In using the various characters as vehicles with which to show this decay, it seems as though al-Aswani makes a distinction between moral decay on a societal level and on a personal level. He seems to emphasize the fact that although to a certain extend heavy social problems are pushing people into terrorist and immoral acts, both levels of moral decay exist; blame for fallen social standards of value, honesty, and integrity cannot exclusively be placed upon the society nor upon individuals alone.