We often come across news reports about Egyptians abroad who have attained prominent leadership positions, yet we rarely give them a second thought – unless, of course, they are movie stars like Rami Malek or football legends like Mohamed Salah.
During a recent visit to Canada, I was struck by how many university presidents and faculty deans were of Egyptian origin of whom, for the most part, we have never heard.
A couple of days ago, my attention was caught by two items that were headline news everywhere, while we barely paid them any heed. The first is the appointment of the Egyptian-American Sherif Soliman as the New York City budget director. This is in the global capital of finance, home to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, the largest stock exchange in the world. Soliman is a highly regarded economist with more than thirty years of financial experience. In the course of his career, he has rescued several major commercial institutions from bankruptcy and succeeded in reducing the debt of others by record proportions.
The recently elected New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said that Soliman far surpassed rival candidates for budget direct. Soliman, for his part, said, “I feel a deep sense of pride joining the administration of the first Muslim mayor of the city of New York.” He will be managing a budget of approximately $121 billion – one of the largest municipal budgets in the world.
Soliman was born to Egyptian parents who emigrated to New York 45 years ago. He is married to the Egyptian Hanan Thabet. They have two children, Lina and Ziad.
At around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British Muslim Laila Cunningham announced her intent to run for Mayor of London in the British capital’s 2028 mayoral race. She will be the first candidate of Egyptian origin to seek the post. Born in London to parents who emigrated from Egypt in the 1960s, she studied law and joined the Conservative Party, then switched to Reform UK. A controversial figure, she advocates empowering and increasing the police force to curb crime, which she claims has turned London into an unsafe city. She also calls for combating what she terms “Islamic terrorism.” She is married to an American and is the mother of seven children.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram
source/content: english.ahram.org.eg (headline edited)
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EGYPTIAN’S / AMERICAN / BRITISH
