Al Aswany is one of the first Cairo novelists to write explicitly about sex and religion, and his main theme is how the injustice and frustration caused by dictatorship transforms these natural and wonderful human experiences into violence and terrorism. I made an appointment to see him privately one evening at his dental clinic in Garden City, originally a Kensington-inspired district of palaces and villas along the Nile's East Bank. Al Aswany's father, also a writer, advised him to have a profession besides literature to fall back on, and he became a full-time dentist after studying at the University of Illinois in Chicago; the job not only earns him a regular salary but brings him into contact with people from all walks of life. A large man, tending to overweight, he has a warm smile and the focused gaze of someone used to diagnosing and resolving sources of pain.

"Egypt," Al Aswany told me, "is suffering from the disease of dictatorship that infects everything from elections to marital relations." But he was hopeful, mentioning that he had himself resisted the temptation to leave for good, and insisting that the democracy movement combined with turmoil in the region has pushed Egyptians to realize that they are on the brink of generational change. "Egypt is like an intelligent person who's been in a coma and woken up," he said. "He's not starting from zero, but he needs a bit of time to recover his personality and get better." Like many secularists, Al Aswany is alarmed by mounting Islamic fundamentalism, the "combat between Egyptian tolerance and civility and closed Wahhabi aggression, an everyday struggle between the two ways of seeing the world."

Islamic dynasties and sects have waxed and waned in Egypt since the Prophet Muhammad's death in a.d. 632 and the arrival of the first Arab army in 641. Today the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia, is growing more influential. Starting in the 1970s, Egyptians flocked to Saudi Arabia for jobs as teachers, construction workers, and household servants. Their remittances are now the second-biggest source of Egypt's hard currency, ahead of Suez Canal receipts and after tourism. Millions of migrants bring back not just money to build and furnish houses that are the envy of their neighbors but also the custom of veiling wives in black abayas and the habit of criticizing those less demonstrative in their faith. The Wahhabi phenomenon has dovetailed with Egyptian political Islam, which arose in the 1940s under the guidance of the Muslim Brotherhood partly as a reaction to British colonialism and centuries of foreign occupation, and which gained strength following the 1952 revolution and the failure of President Gamal Abdul Nasser's secular pan-Arab socialism to solve Egypt's problems.

To quell Islamic opposition, the Mubarak government has banned political parties based on religion. At the same time, to enhance its own religious legitimacy, it encourages social Islam through the sheikhs of Al-Azhar University, the Arab world's oldest academy, who are continually issuing fatwas on dress and behavior. Cairenes besiege their offices and Internet sites with requests for rulings on whether kidney dialysis and liposuction are "un-Islamic," and the sheikhs often find themselves in ever more convoluted arguments about the compatibility of Islam and modern life: Last spring, a scholar issued a fatwa urging female office workers to breast-feed male colleagues to make them "blood relatives" and thus circumvent Islamic rules of sexual segregation. The irony of this puritanical climate is that Cairo has a reputation throughout the Arab world for a garish joie de vivre. In summer, tens of thousands of Saudi citizens vacation here to enjoy social freedoms, and many partake in entertainments banned at home, including casinos, belly dancing clubs, alcohol-serving restaurants, movie theaters, and mixed-gender hotel swimming pools.