After a few days without food, the hunger stops. The body, while weak, “learns how to just function.” That is how Laila Soueif, an Egyptian mathematician and professor, describes her hunger strike, which reached 55 days on Saturday.
She stopped eating on Sept. 29, when it became clear that her son, Alaa Abd El Fattah, one of Egypt’s best known political prisoners, would not be released after serving a five-year sentence.
Egyptian authorities had sent him a written notice that they would not be counting his two years of pretrial detention, an increasingly routine practice in the country. Mr. Abd El Fattah, 43, is now scheduled for release in 2027, although he and his family fear he may be held indefinitely.
His plight is just one example of the crushing campaign against dissent orchestrated by Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, since he came to power in a 2013 military takeover, with tens of thousands of political prisoners now incarcerated, according to rights groups.
Ms. Soueif, 68, said she plans to continue her hunger strike — surviving on water, rehydration salts and sugarless tea and coffee — until he is free.
“I won’t back down and I will be very visible,” Ms. Soueif said in an interview in London on Thursday. “When people ask, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I say, ‘I’m creating a crisis.’”
She had flown to London from Cairo ahead of a Nov. 27 meeting with David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, who she hopes will lean on the Egyptian government to help secure the release of her son, a British and Egyptian dual citizen. But such diplomatic efforts have a mixed rate of success in the past.
Mr. Abd El Fattah came to prominence as one of the most eloquent voices of Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising, which toppled its longtime, authoritarian ruler, Hosni Mubarak. But things did not go the way that liberal revolutionaries had hoped. An Islamist political party took power in Egypt’s first democratic presidential election, and widespread backlash to its rule allowed Mr. el-Sisi to seize power.
Mr. Abdel Fattah chronicled that period, and the authoritarian clampdown that followed, in social media posts, newspaper columns and essays published in 2021 as a collection, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.”
Much of the time, he was writing from prison. First arrested in 2006 for protesting in favor of judicial independence, then in 2011 for an article critical of Egypt’s military, he was detained again from 2013 until March 2019 on charges of organizing an illegal protest. In September that year he was arrested again and sentenced in 2021 to five years for sharing a Facebook post about prison abuses.
While incarcerated, he applied for British citizenship through his mother, who is a dual national. Since then, his family has called on the British government to use its diplomatic and economic ties with Egypt to secure his release.
Mr. Lammy had campaigned for Mr. Abd El Fattah’s release while his party was in opposition, meeting with the family, joining them in a protest outside the Foreign Office and raising the issue of his detention in Parliament. So when Mr. Lammy became foreign secretary in July under a new Labour government, the family hoped he would use his new status to pressure Egypt.
They pointed to Britain’s success in negotiating the 2022 release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen who had been detained by Tehran for six years, though in that case London had the added bargaining chip of a longstanding payment owed to Iran over a failed arms deal.
So far, there has been no progress in her son’s case, Ms. Soueif said. Egyptian authorities did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Britain’s foreign office said in a statement that Mr. Lammy had raised the case with Egypt’s foreign minister “on a number of occasions, most recently on Nov. 14,” adding: “Our priority remains securing consular access to Mr. El-Fattah and his release so he can be reunited with his family.”
In November 2022, Mr. Abd El Fattah, who had already been on hunger strike for months, stopped drinking water as Egypt hosted the United Nations COP 27 climate conference.
During that event, activists called on Egypt to “free Alaa,” and world leaders pushed for his release in meetings with Mr. el-Sisi. But Egypt did not cave. About a week later, Mr. Abd El Fattah resumed eating and drinking after suffering an emotional and physical breakdown.
Western pressure has helped free some other Egyptian political prisoners in recent years, and the authorities have occasionally released prominent detainees in what analysts and opposition politicians say is partly an attempt to clean up Egypt’s international image. (The limited releases were dwarfed by new arrests, rights groups say.)
But diplomats in Cairo say that raising specific cases with Egyptian officials can backfire.
“We have this everlasting dilemma: The Egyptian authorities don’t like to be pressured — don’t like to be pushed,” Ms. Soueif said. “But my position is that they won’t do anything if they’re not pressured and not pushed.”
Ms. Soueif has challenged the idea, which has circulated among some of her son’s supporters, that Mr. el-Sisi is personally opposed to his release. She noted that Mr. el-Sisi had grievances with two other well-known prisoners, who were nevertheless released last year.
That gives her hope that Mr. Abd El Fattah can yet be freed, asserting: “It is doable.”
British diplomats in Cairo have consistently pressed for consular visits and for his release since he gained British citizenship, but with no success. These days, it is even less clear what leverage Britain can exert over Cairo. Egypt is in a stronger position internationally than in 2022.
The war in Gaza, which borders Egypt, has led Western backers such as the United States, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to flood Egypt with aid, seeing Egypt as an indispensable partner in a crisis-wracked region.
This is not Ms. Soueif’s first hunger strike. A decade ago, she and her daughter, Mona, did not eat for 70 days. That was to protest a previous imprisonment of Mr. Abd El Fattah and of Sanaa, her youngest daughter, both of whom were jailed for taking part in separate street protests.
She said she would consider progress on her son’s case as a reason to end her current strike, but she is prepared for the worst.
“If — for this crisis to hit home — it needs me to go as far as falling apart or dying, then that’s what will happen,” she said. “I hope I don’t get there.”
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