Review: Kim Ghattas on Alaa Abd el-Fattah
Review: Kim Ghattas on Alaa Abd el-Fattah
Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah stands in a defendant’s cage while on trial in Cairo with twenty-four other defendants, including former Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi, May 23, 2015 (photo by Mostafa el-Shemy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Every morning, like millions around the world, I check Twitter for the latest news, headlines, and updates. But every morning, for years now, I check one account in particular to find out: Has he been defeated? And I breathe a sigh of relief when I learn that Mona Seif, sister of jailed political activist and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah, has posted about Alaa’s health on hunger strike in an Egyptian jail or another action to raise awareness of his case. He has not been defeated, I think to myself, then neither has the revolution. Not yet.
Although Alaa put an end to his six-month hunger strike in mid-November, he is withering physically; he is, in his own words, the “ghost of spring past.” Alaa is the most visible, potent symbol of the Arab Spring, the 2011 revolutions that swept the Arab world and, in Egypt, brought down longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. He has spent most of the past decade behind bars: officially, on charges of spreading false news on Facebook; in reality, because he is a free thinker and activist whose intellect and vision threaten thin-skinned, vindictive dictators like Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He comes from a family of activists: his own father, human rights defender and lawyer Ahmed Seif al-Islam Hamad was detained twice during the presidency of Anwar el-Sadat and twice under Mubarak, including a five-year stint in prison, during which he was badly tortured. In the age of social media, his son’s reach extends beyond Egypt, beyond the Arab world—Alaa represents a global generation struggling for civil rights, dignity, and justice, from Egypt to Iran to China.
His plight came into sharp relief in October, when Egypt hosted the international United Nations climate conference COP27, and Alaa’s sister Sanaa, along with human rights and climate activists, seized the occasion, and the stage, to remind the world not only of Alaa’s fate but also the increased oppression in the country and the necessary link between human rights and climate justice. Alaa is no longer able to address such international audiences in person, as he did at the inaugural RightsCon Conference in 2011. In 2017, in prison and unable to travel, he writes a letter to that year’s RightsCon: “Fix your own democracy: This has always been my answer to the question ‘How can we help?’ … a setback for human rights in a place where democracy has deep roots is certain to be used as an excuse for even worse violations in societies where rights are more fragile.” He believes strongly that countries share a common struggle against authoritarianism. “We reach out to you not in search of powerful allies but because we confront the same global problems, and share universal values, and with a firm belief in the power of solidarity.”
Alaa’s exhortation—You Have Not Been Defeated—became the title of his book, a collection of writings, social media posts, and interviews, some published in local outlets during stints of freedom, and some written with pencil and paper inside prison and smuggled out. The work was collected, edited, and translated by an anonymous collective of family, friends, and supporters and published in English with a foreword by Naomi Klein. The book is “living history,” the chronology of a revolution thwarted, of a life in animated suspension. It records the euphoria of the 2011 demonstrators and the end of Hosni Mubarak’s long autocratic rule, the military coup that quashed a period of protest and tumult and nascent democracy, and the dictatorial rise of Sisi, whose determination to suppress all dissent includes modern, democratizing figures like Alaa. Alaa’s is the story of a young idealistic activist as he matures in prison, away from his wife and newborn child, but whose ideas and writings sound powerfully in their clarity and breadth—and prescience in his warnings about authoritarianism, technology controlled by tycoons like as Mark Zuckerberg and now Elon Musk with Twitter, and the inherent weaknesses in democracies.
Alaa’s fate recalls that of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who inspired a movement while spending twenty-seven years in jail, and Italy’s Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned for eleven years for opposing Italy’s Benito Mussolini, writing his own influential Prison Notebooks. It is hard to see how Alaa could emerge from prison to lead a political movement or rise to power as Mandela did, though. His future is most likely exile if he were to be released, or, like Gramsci, a hospital bed, too weak and ill to continue. Unlike Mandela, Alaa gets no high-profile visitors, not even consular access as a dual British-Egyptian citizen, only occasional family visits behind glass. The Egyptian government would like Alaa fully silenced, which is why his book is such a testament to the persistence of the ideas he represents.
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There are an estimated sixty thousand political prisoners in Egypt’s dungeons. Among them is former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the army and Sisi are doing their best to eradicate. Mohamed Morsi, also a member of the Brotherhood, elected president in 2012 in Egypt’s first democratic election, has already perished in jail. Secular, progressive, inspiring voices are also deemed a threat, like activist Ahmed Douma, blogger Mohamed “Oxygen” Ibrahim, and journalist Ismail Alexandrani. We are reminded of them and countless others whose names and alleged crimes we will never know by Mona’s tweets, which are often accompanied by the hashtags #FreeAlaa #FreeThemAll.
In a section of the book titled “Six Major Crimes Impeding Change,” Alaa describes the obstacles to democratic reform in Egypt, including the regime’s intentions in jailing him and others: “These are not prisons and we are not defendants. The large numbers indicate that the aim is not just oppression but the eradication, firstly, of the Islamist movement, and then any form of opposition.” He writes that an organized opposition is a precondition for political change when repression has extinguished all conditions for popular uprising.
Sisi’s mass detention is the work of an insecure, retributive dictator, coddled, or barely scolded, by Western countries that continue to prioritize stability, and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, over everything—which is why Alaa is not without controversy.
A group of EU parliamentarians nominated him for the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2014, before withdrawing the nomination when a series of Alaa’s tweets from 2011 and 2012 came to light, in which he defended the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 and called for the killing of Egyptian interior ministers, who “are all criminals.” When challenged online by fellow Egyptians and asked to delete the tweet, Alaa pointed to Mandela: “If peaceful revolution fails then armed struggle may be necessary, do you admire nelson mandela?” A more shocking tweet came in reply to two friends discussing, on its first night, what would become an eight-day Israeli assault on Gaza in November 2012, when he said that “a critical number of Israelis” must be killed for the occupation to end.
Alaa revisits the tweet in one of the book’s essays, first published in the independent Egyptian journal Mada Masr. He references the surrounding thread, which discusses whether such a conflict “can be resolved by local actors.” Alaa argued that asymmetric wars end when “the price of occupation/colonization/apartheid [becomes] too expensive for the society that supports it” and refers to the armed resistance in Algeria and Vietnam, again citing Mandela as an example, reminding readers that for a long time Mandela was considered a terrorist in the West.
These are the uncomfortable truths at the heart of many struggles for freedom, challenges that could push some to muffle such voices. But we should not shy away from trying to understand or scrutinize such ideas. We should listen to those who, like Alaa, have stubbornly continued the call for liberation begun in 2011, or else we would be abandoning a generation that has courageously confronted authoritarianism then and now. Argue with him you may, but Alaa has become a symbol and leading voice for freedom and dignity that cannot be silenced, however constrained he is physically, remaining undefeated in the pages of his book.
Kim Ghattas is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East. She was a longtime broadcast and print journalist covering the Middle East and the State Department. She recently launched the podcast People Like Us, conversations with people from and about the greater Middle East about contemporary events and trends, speaking in particular to the concerns of a young generation in the US, the Arab world, and the global Arab diaspora.
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