Shortly before 10 A.M. on August 22, 2019, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a bushy-haired Egyptian blogger and activist, who had woken up that morning in a police station in Cairo, shared a Facebook post with his hundred and sixty-seven thousand followers. El-Fattah, who was thirty-seven, had become a national figure in Egypt during the country’s 2011 revolution. He was part of a generation who believed that open-source programming and a free internet would transform societies in the Middle East. The post that el-Fattah shared described the death, nine days earlier, of Hossam Hamed, an inmate at the Tora Maximum Security 2 Prison, on the outskirts of Cairo. El-Fattah appended six words to the account—“Second murder in the discipline cells”—and sent it out.
Five months earlier, el-Fattah had been released on parole from the same facility, which holds hundreds of opponents of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has ruled Egypt since taking power following a military coup twelve years ago. El-Fattah served a five-year sentence for helping to organize a protest outside the Egyptian Parliament in 2013. As a condition of his probation, el-Fattah, who had a seven-year-old son, had to present himself at six o’clock every evening at his local police station, in the district of Dokki, and spend the night in a wooden cubicle in the courtyard.
El-Fattah called the cubicle the Kiosk of Solitude. “I’m trying to get used to ignoring the details of life in a police station,” he wrote in an article that August. He tried to avoid going to the bathroom. He kept his bedding in his car. He was disarmingly frank about the failure of the Egyptian revolution and his own role in it. El-Fattah often referred to himself as a ghost, whose future had failed to materialize. “I don’t want to know what’s happening around me,” he wrote. “I’ve completely lost my curiosity about the workings of the Egyptian state, especially the organs that rule our bodies.”
A little more than a month after he shared the Facebook post about Hamed, el-Fattah was arrested by plainclothes officers and taken back to Tora prison, where he was stripped and beaten. Several Egyptian cities had recently experienced street protests against government corruption. The disturbances weren’t particularly serious, but they were the most widespread since Sisi took power. Around five hundred activists were detained, and el-Fattah’s family assumed that he had been caught up in a routine sweep of opposition voices. “I thought, This is a moment of panic they’re having. I didn’t think he would be kept that long,” Laila Soueif, his mother, told me recently.
El-Fattah has been incarcerated ever since. (In 2021, he was officially given a five-year sentence for “spreading false news” in the six-word addendum to the Facebook post.) In the process, he has become Egypt’s best-known political prisoner, while Soueif, a darkly humorous mathematician, has come to occupy an even more incendiary role in the country’s conscience: the unbowing mother. Soueif, who is sixty-nine, was a professor of mathematics at Cairo University, where she published papers on the properties of skew group rings. She joined her first protest—against the military regime of Anwar Sadat—as a high-school student, in 1972. “I would have been kicked out of school, like, ten times, if I hadn’t been this top math student,” she recalled.
El-Fattah’s father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad, was a human-rights lawyer who was imprisoned during the eighties for his activism. The family’s private history of births, weddings, and deaths is crosshatched with an official record of case numbers, trials, arrests, and detentions. Both el-Fattah and his younger sister Mona were behind bars when their father died, in 2014. When I met Soueif in London a few weeks ago, with Sanaa, her other daughter, she remembered explaining to el-Fattah why his father was in prison. “I said that there were good police and bad police,” she said. “Good police were for putting out fires and directing traffic and catching thieves, and bad police were for keeping people from trying to change the government.” Soueif’s tone shifted, to one of amused regret. “Now we only have bad police,” she went on. “The good police have dwindled and dwindled.”
Last September, el-Fattah completed another five years in prison. But, instead of releasing him, the Egyptian authorities announced that his pretrial detention did not count as part of his sentence, and that he would be held until 2027. In response, Soueif began a hunger strike, subsisting on water, rehydration salts, and black tea and coffee. (In 2022, el-Fattah had carried out his own hunger strike, which his family believes ended with his being force-fed.) “I’m very close to him,” Soueif told me. “In a lot of things, we click the same way. And, even when we don’t think the same way, we understand how we click.” When Sanaa told el-Fattah that their mother was planning to go on a hunger strike, he knew better than to try to dissuade her. “He asked me, ‘Is this a decision decision?’ ” Sanaa said. “He knows me so well,” Soueif murmured.
Soueif was born in London, where her mother was studying for a Ph.D. in English literature. As a child, Soueif used to visit England regularly. She read precociously, in English and in Arabic. Her mother started her on Jane Austen when she was nine or ten. “She probably thought it was the safest,” Soueif said. “There’s no violence.”
In 2021, el-Fattah received British citizenship, through Soueif’s nationality. He was being held in Tora prison at the time, with strict conditions on his communication. His family conveyed the news of his naturalization in the form of a blank postcard of the Queen, which he kept in his cell, its only picture. His incarceration has become a test case for British diplomacy in Egypt—a test that Britain has largely failed. In 2017, President Donald Trump negotiated the release of Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian American charity worker, who had been arrested on child-abuse charges by the Sisi regime. (An Egyptian court dropped the charges against Hijazi.) In 2023, the Italian government helped to secure a pardon for Patrick George Zaki, an Egyptian student who was detained for almost two years for writing an opinion column in a student newspaper, after a trip home from the University of Bologna. In contrast, no U.K. official has visited el-Fattah since he became a British citizen. The only improvement in his conditions was in May, 2022, when he was transferred to Wadi el-Natrun prison, a modern, relatively low-security facility, south of Cairo. Visibly, at least, the British government has been unwilling to exert meaningful pressure on the Egyptian authorities, despite the U.K. being Egypt’s third-largest foreign investor and a major supplier of military training and equipment. “I really think the British are weak,” Sanaa said. “They don’t know how to do it.”
Last winter, Soueif stood for an hour most mornings outside the headquarters of the British Foreign Office, in London. She lost more than a third of her body weight. On February 24th, she was hospitalized after a collapse in her blood-sugar levels. Four days later, Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, called President Sisi to discuss el-Fattah’s case. The call led to a flurry of diplomatic movement. Jonathan Powell, Britain’s national-security adviser, who helped to broker the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, took a leading role in the negotiations, and there were subsequent meetings between the two sides in March and in April. Soueif increased her food intake to three hundred calories a day, in the form of a single bottle of Fortisip, a nutritional supplement.
But, after that, progress stalled. “There’s a weird silence at this moment,” Sanaa said. Everyone agrees that el-Fattah’s case is knotty. It has a dynastic, feud-like quality. Sisi, a former director of Egypt’s military intelligence, was el-Fattah’s father’s interrogator when he was detained during the revolution. “I think it’s a very personal case for the Egyptian senior people,” John Casson, Britain’s Ambassador to the country between 2014 and 2018, told me. At the same time, there is an unshakable sense that successive British Foreign Secretaries and Prime Ministers have been scared to kick up a fuss. “I thought the challenges we would be facing would be geopolitics or actual big reasons. Then, if my mother ever dies, I can say that these were too big of a challenge for me to fight,” Sanaa said. “But if it’s, like, mediocrity, that’s really sad.”
When I stopped in to see Soueif and Sanaa earlier this month, their bags were packed. The family was giving up an apartment they had been renting in South London and flying to Cairo the next day. Soueif sat on the end of a sofa, next to a large window, in the afternoon sunshine. She was scheduled to see her son in two days, her first visit since January. She was so thin as to be almost without substance. She compared herself to the mummy of Ramesses II. When she got up to make herself a cup of tea, she stood leaning against the kitchen cabinets, like a marionette against a wall. She was worried that el-Fattah would be alarmed when he saw her. (In March, after Soueif’s hospitalization, he began another hunger strike.) Normally, the family is able to see him once a month, but the authorities had granted an extra visit, because of a national holiday. The family members are typically separated by glass, and so Soueif’s main hope was that she would be able to touch her son. (A few days later, on her second visit, Soueif and el-Fattah sat on a sofa together for the first time in years.) “Sometimes, you know, even in the middle of it all, we get these five minutes of talking about a book, for instance, or something funny that happened in the news,” Soueif said. “Five to ten minutes of normal conversation.”
We talked about the origins of el-Fattah’s activism. When he was a teen-ager, he found a photograph in the family apartment. It was of a suspected thief, who had been doused with kerosene and set on fire by the police—one of his father’s cases. El-Fattah and a friend made copies and handed them out to startled commuters on trains in Cairo. “One of the reasons why I knew it was hopeless to try and pull him back is that my mother tried to pull me back so many times,” Soueif said. “It was utterly useless.” El-Fattah is a lyrical, grave, funny writer. In 2021, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” a collection of his work, was published in English, and it vibrates with the necessity—and madness—of standing up to authoritarian rule. “If despair is treason, what is hope?” el-Fattah writes. “At least despair speaks frankly. Hope is treacherous.”
