General practitioner and future surgeon-to-be, Islam has segued into the world of IT after years of active FLOSS community support and freelancing. He is a self-taught hardcore GNU/Linux expert and fanatic with skills including server administration, system engineering, embedded and real time systems, application programming, configuration management, and web programming, in addition to his practical medical skills.

During medical school, he volunteered to be the college's server administrator at the Medical Education Development Center and helped found the Learning Resource Center data center. He is an active member of The Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group, trying to provide technical support to help spread GNU/Linux. He participated in several major events promoting FLOSS in Egypt. Serving the same purpose, he developed a GNU/Linux live CD called "Phaeronix" which had many innovations and tweaks but is currently discontinued. He actively contributes to many FLOSS projects and recently created a project called "gDevilspie".

Islam holds a BSc in Medical and Surgical Studies from Cairo University.