‘Foreign Policy’ Ranks UIC College of Dentistry's Dr. Alaa Al Aswany as No. 1 Global Thinker

Jan. 27, 2012 - PRLog -- The magazine Foreign Policy honored the “100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011” in its Dec. 2011 issue, and ranked No. 1 was dentist and University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Dentistry alumnus Dr. Alaa Al Aswany, MS Histology ’85.

In comparison, President Barack Obama was ranked  No. 11, software mogul Bill Gates was No. 13, and President Nicholas Sarkozy of France was No. 21.

The magazine ranked “The Arab Revolutionaries” in the No. 1 through No. 9 slots, and numbered Dr. Al Aswany first among them. It called them “an extraordinary collection of brave men and women who helped make 2011 the year that democracy—haltingly, incompletely to be sure, but also dazzlingly and astonishingly quickly—came to broad swaths of the Middle East that had long languished under despotism and decay.”

Dr. Al Aswany lives in Cairo, Egypt, and is the leading novelist in the Arab world. His book The Yacoubian Building has been published in 17 languages and is a worldwide bestseller, and his novel Chicago is set at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Al Aswany also is a political essayist whose work appears in newspapers in the Middle East. He was a longtime critic of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s now-deposed regime.

Foreign Policy noted that Dr. Al Aswany, after the Arab Spring uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, “has tried to keep the revolution’s spirit alive since, pressing the country’s ruling military junta to remove the vestiges of Hosni Mubarak’s regime…. In the process, Al Aswany has given voice to a people silenced for too long.”

“I believe it’s my duty towards my people and my country,” he said.

Dr. Al Aswany gives credit to UIC for his success. “The experience at UIC was very, very rich and I believe it changed my life,” he said. “It not only taught me dentistry but taught me other useful things: how to see and analyze life. I believe now I’m very successful because of some very essential things I learned at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

UIC presented him with the Alumni Achievement Award, the University’s highest honor, in 2010. See http://vimeo.com/26802296.



Dr. Al Aswany continues to practice dentistry in Cairo. Founded in 1970, Foreign Policy is the premier magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas. It is published by the Slate Group, a division of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive LLC in Washington, DC.

For more about the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry, see http://dentistry.uic.edu/.