Basma Abdel Aziz has a BA in medicine and surgery, an MS in neuropsychiatry, and a diploma in sociology. She works for the General Secretariat of Mental Health in Egypt's Ministry of Health and the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture.
Abdel-Aziz gained second place for her short stories in the 2008 Sawiris Cultural Award, and a 2008 award from the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces. Her sociological examination of police violence in Egypt, Temptation of Absolute Power, won the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award in 2009.
Her debut novel Al-Tabuur [The Queue] was published in 2013, and Melville House published an English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016.
In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy 's Leading Global Thinkers.[ In 2018 she was named by The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in the list of top influencers of Arabic public opinion.
I believe that one very important thing about this book is that it introduces Critical Discourse Analysis to the Arabic reader. And I think that the author did so successfully by making this dry subject more readable by her style of writing and more interesting by choosing a subject that is current and of interest for a lot of the readers.
One of the of the important idea that the author discussed and studied in the book was the personification of ElAzhar organization in its head. She gave very good examples from ElAzhar鈥�-and its head鈥�-discourse that show the borders between them are quite vague. I was just wondering if this concept is unique to the Arab people: 鈥淢asr Mubarak鈥�, the president as the 鈥渟ymbol鈥� of the state, and the kings before. Or is it universal(with different degrees of course)? I am thinking of the Pope in the Catholic Church, Ataturk as 鈥渢he father of the Turks, etc...