The Dictatorship Syndrome

‘Al Aswany is a world writer, making Egyptian concerns into human ones and beautifully illuminating our always extraordinary and sometimes sad and baffling world.’

-- The Times

‘Aswany’s The Dictatorship Syndrome seeks to pathologise autocracy with the eye of both medical professional and author preoccupied with the human condition.’

-- Financial Times

‘The book helps us scrutinise and better understand ourselves, as citizens and members of society, as much as it gives a sharp analytical insight into the complex elements that constitute dictatorships in the Middle East and what fate may await.’

-- Inside Arabia

‘great observations and thought-provoking insight’

-- Egyptian Streets

‘… Al Aswany’s intention isn’t to give a history lesson. More ambitious, the intellectual analyses the mechanisms that lead to dictatorship: those characteristic of the figure of the autocrat, but also those that drive an entire people to accept – in a way – the absolute power of one man alone.’

-- The Africa Report

‘a very readable account of some of the author’s history and ideas’

-- Chartist Magazine

‘Aswany is optimistic that The Dictatorship Syndrome is a curable disease and that Pharaohs can be put to pasture, both to save humanity and give hope to those who dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’

-- Contemporary Review of the Middle East

‘… describes, with illuminating precision, what a real dictatorship consists of’

-- Le Monde

‘It is a very worrying but readable for a book about a fairly grim subject matter… eloquently describes just how normal people in a democracy can become inadvertent enablers and supporters of this type of person.’

-- Halfman, Halfbook Blog

‘Impressively informative, keenly insightful, exceptionally thoughtful and thought- provoking.’

-- Midwest Book Re