Born in Egypt, educated at Victoria College and the English British schools, in 1965 El-Wakil graduated with Distinction and a First Class Honors Bachelor of Science in architecture at Ain Shams University, Cairo. From 1965 to 1970, El-Wakil was appointed to the position of Instructor and Lecturer at Ain Shams University in the department of Architecture under the Faculty of Engineering. Two years later, El-Wakil experienced a profound shift in architectural thought when he met the legendary Professor Hassan Fathy. 

El-Wakil built mosques, public buildings and private residences throughout the Middle East maintaining a balance between continuity and change. His work includes the Halawa House in Agamy, Egypt, for which he won his first Aga Khan Award for Architecture (1980); He was accorded the title of Professor by the International Academy of Architecture and the International Union of Architects in 1988, and was invited as a visiting Professor to University of Miami. His works on the residence of Ahmed Sulaiman in Jeddah, the Quba Mosque and Qiblatain Mosque in Medina and the Corniche Mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia granted him the second Aga Khan Award (1989).  

All of his works portrayed the overall principles of Islamic architecture and culture while reflecting the regional character and locality in which each structure resides. As a prentice of Hassan Fathy, El-Wakil works with traditional design principles that use indigenous materials and processes, while integrating them with contemporary technology to create familiar, functional and environmentally sustainable structures that are both timeless and for our time.

The Prince of Wales who shares this approach toward architecture has selected him among his advisors for the Prince of Wales School of Architecture and as Patron to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. At this Oxford center he brought his sense of tradition to the Western world where he exhibits an ingenious blending of Oxford's traditional architecture with Islamic elements and marked this Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies, Oxford, United Kingdom as one of his signatures.

As one of the leading voices in contemporary Islamic architecture and a practitioner known, worldwide, for his principles in traditional form and technique, with a deep understanding of the past, as he creates and shapes his design in the new urbanism, El-Wakil was awarded the 2009 Richard H. Driehaus Prize laureate.

El-Wakil is now engaged in three projects in Beirut, Lebanon, including a master planning project in Qatar that combines energy-efficient planning with Islamic designs.