Shortly after I arrived at Tora Maximum Security Prison in Cairo, a prisoner with a trendy haircut and glasses entered my cell, handed me a plastic bag and whispered, “From Alaa.” Inside the bag were several packs of cigarettes, the currency of the prison; blue and white T-shirts, the only colors prisoners could wear; and small plastic packets of tea and sugar.
It was February 2016. I had been arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for writing a novel whose obscenity, the authorities said, violated the law. The welcome package was a gift from my dear friend Alaa Abd El Fattah, an activist and a political prisoner who was then entering his second year in the Tora prison. He is still locked away.
Alaa was supposed to be freed in September. He was first arrested in 2013 for protesting against Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime and spent five years in prison. And then, in 2019, he was arrested for “spreading false news undermining national security” and was sent to prison for another five years. That term should have ended in September. Yet the Egyptian government arbitrarily extended the sentence for two more years.
My friend’s case is a stark reminder of the growing lawlessness of Egypt under President Sisi, who has systematically dismantled state institutions since taking power in 2014. These institutions had shielded Egypt from complete collapse in 2011, after President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Today, trust in every pillar of society — including the army and the judiciary — has eroded. At times, they seem to serve as mere ornamentation.
I met Alaa in 2005, during Egypt’s first presidential election. American troops had recently occupied Iraq, and the administration of President George W. Bush maintained a close relationship with Egypt’s longtime ruler, Mr. Mubarak, thanks to tight security cooperation and about $1.5 billion in annual military aid. President Bush sought to reshape the Middle East, supposedly promoting democracy, reform and freedom. Under American pressure, several Arab allies, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, were compelled to make superficially democratic gestures, like staged elections.
The 2005 Egyptian election was a spectacle. Mr. Mubarak had been in power for 24 years. Everybody acted as if it were a real contest, but the winner was known in advance. I was 20, and Alaa was 23; we talked about how crazy Egypt’s Western backers were, pretending as they did that the king was clothed when he was, in fact, naked.
The internet was spreading everywhere, and we were the first generation of young Egyptians to sneak behind our parents’ backs and steal phone cords to connect to the internet through dial-up. We went online, read things we weren’t supposed to read and wrote things we weren’t supposed to write. I used to blog under a pseudonym, while Alaa boldly published his own blog with his face and name.
Alaa’s goal was always, as he once put it, to take politics out of the hands of politicians and make it a daily practice for the people. He believed that new technology could facilitate direct democracy and reduce the influence of a superficial representative democracy. For his activism, he was arrested for the first time in 2006. Though Mr. Mubarak’s regime released him that time after 44 days, the episode was an omen of just how intimately prison and state violence would shape our lives.
Years later, Alaa remained a dreamer. In the desperate, dull days of the Mubarak regime, there were dreamers and there were nihilists. Both kinds of people believed that Egypt would never be free of Mr. Mubarak and that Egypt’s citizens could never shape their own lives.
At first, the Jan. 25 Revolution in 2011 seemed to prove us both wrong. A moment of rebirth suddenly appeared. Alaa emerged as a speaker in Tahrir Square, a representative of the revolutionary forces negotiating with political parties and the army. He founded new social and political initiatives. And he excelled in his favored role as a computer programmer, striving for a freer, fairer internet for all.
For the first time since 1952, Egypt held fair elections, and Egyptians seemed to reclaim their agency, with people finally able to shape their futures. This fragile momentum was abruptly halted when Mr. Sisi rose to power in a coup. One of his first actions as president was to arrest Alaa in November 2013 for encouraging a protest against the new constitution. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Soon after, the Sisi regime unleashed a widespread crackdown on Egyptian society. Some people were sentenced to years in prison for nothing more than a tweet.
I, too, was caught in this wave of state retribution. After I had been in prison for three months, the authorities moved me, by coincidence, to Alaa’s cell, where he showed me how to live in dignity and resistance. When we were banned from leaving our overcrowded cell, he would pace in circles for hours at a time to keep his muscles active. He would read the newspapers, watch state TV and write down economic figures in a small notebook, because no matter how much the news media lied, those numbers still revealed fragments of truth.
By December 2016, I had appealed my sentence, and I was released. It was the last time I saw Alaa. A few years later, he was let out — and swiftly rearrested. Egyptian authorities tortured him, according to Amnesty International.
It has been more than a decade since Mr. Sisi began his iron-fisted rule. Throughout this time, he has maintained close collaboration with Republican and Democratic U.S. administrations. With the U.S. and Western allies now focused primarily on supporting Israel’s military pursuits, their longstanding talk of fostering democracy and freedom of speech as foundations for Middle East stability has all but vanished.
Over the past year alone, the region has had alarming regressions: Kuwait’s emir suspended a number of articles of the constitution; Qatar is considering whether to revert to an appointment system for its Shura Council, canceling elections; and Egypt is preparing amendments to criminal procedure laws that threaten the judiciary’s remaining credibility. The continued imprisonment of Alaa has become a symbol of this unraveling — and a stark sign of democratic defeat.
But my friend doesn’t see it that way. In his book “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” much of which he wrote in prison, Alaa acknowledges his own defeat, but insists that those of us on the outside must persist:
We shall look to the lizards, starfish and earthworms — those beings that can regenerate after any injury, no matter how grave. We shall accept that regenerated organs may not be identical to what was lost. They could appear to be mutilated, but look closer and you will see the beauty in monstrosity.
The post To Understand Egypt, Meet My Friend, a Political Prisoner appeared first on New York Times.
