A whole generation is in prison for daring to dream.
 | By Max Strasser Assistant Editor, Opinion |
No one knows precisely how many political prisoners there are in Egypt. Human rights groups have estimated that it's about 60,000, but even the Egyptian government probably isn't certain. Some are members of the Muslim Brotherhood; some are secular activists for democracy and civil and human rights. A whole generation is rotting away in crowded dungeons. |
Alaa Abd El Fattah is one of the most famous. Alaa — he is widely known by his first name — is an activist, a writer and a thinker who has spent most of the decade since Egypt's 2011 uprising in prison, dubiously charged with crimes by each of the three successive regimes that have ruled the country. |
Alaa's mother, Laila Soueif, has written a guest essay today, drawing attention to his case, the thousands like him, and what people outside Egypt may be able to do about it. |
He will be sentenced on Dec. 20 for "spreading false news." The defense wasn't even allowed to present its case. In fact, one of Alaa's co-defendants is his lawyer. That's the Egyptian justice system. |
Soueif quotes from an essay Alaa wrote in 2017, which is included in "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated," a collection of Alaa's speeches, interviews and writings — many of them smuggled out of prison — that will be published in the United States next year. The book is already out in Britain, where I live, and I've been lucky enough to read it. |
It explains why he is one of the most famous of the countless political prisoners in Egypt: his ideas. This is also what makes him dangerous to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's government, and why he is relevant far beyond Egypt's borders. |
Alaa is an incisive thinker, with a wide-ranging intellect, as much at home critiquing Silicon Valley technology as he is talking about constitutional reform. And through all his writing run the themes that animated Egypt's 2011 revolution: freedom and justice. |
Those are, of course, the core demands of movements around the world. That's not lost on Alaa. Another persistent theme in his writings is international solidarity. He draws inspiration from South Africa's anti-Apartheid struggle and studies the Greek debt crisis. The quote that Alaa's mother cites shows this. It describes the people of his generation — which I'm a part of — who "took our first real steps in the world as the bombs fell on Baghdad." He's not just writing about Egyptians or Arabs, but also the "Northern allies" who chanted 'Not in our name!'" |
Alaa sees the fights for freedom and justice around the world as connected. (After all, the United States gives its ally Egypt more than $1 billion a year.) If he weren't in prison, it's easy to imagine how he'd be lending his support, for example, to the people of Hong Kong as they fight repression from Beijing; or how he would condemn attacks on democracy in America. We would all receive his solidarity. He deserves ours. |
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