If the Egyptian government maintains a list of grudges, Alaa Abdel Fattah and Lina Attalah are likely near the top of it. Longtime friends of each other and Bidoun both, Alaa and Lina have been at the forefront of the opposition movement in Egypt for the better part of two decades — Alaa as an activist and writer, Lina as a journalist and editor. For as many times as Alaa has been arrested and spent time in prison, Lina has had to answer to the public prosecutor on a range of bogus charges leveled against her in relation to the award-winning investigative journalism website Mada Masr, which she launched in 2013. The website was coded and developed by Alaa over a period of months between 2012 and 2013; he completed the work from jail. Forty three years old, Alaa has spent the majority of the past twelve years behind bars, and although he recently served out a five-year sentence, he remains in the high-security Wadi Al-Natrun prison complex on charges of “spreading false news.” He has not stopped writing in that time — essays smuggled out of prison in ways we don’t quite know, and collected in the book We Have Not Yet Been Defeated (Fitzcarraldo Editions and Seven Stories Press). Last month, the writer Arundhati Roy shared the PEN Pinter Prize for 2024 with Alaa, anointing him as a Writer of Courage. Lina was there to accept the award on his behalf.
–Bidoun
I met Alaa for the first time at a protest downtown defending the independence of the judiciary. It was 2006 and we were both in our twenties. Alaa was effervescent — jumping around, waving his arms, protesting with his whole body. His energy was infectious. Even after he was grabbed by the cops, he continued to writhe as they dragged him off into a police truck. We laugh, now, when we remember our first meeting, how chaotic and unflattering the scene was.
Alaa was in prison for 45 days, and shortly after he was released, he told me about an idea that he had: an assembly of “politically conscious techies,” which he wanted to convene in Cairo. I was working as a journalist, and had a network of contacts across the region. Alaa was a key figure at the forefront of Egypt’s blogging generation, but sitting behind a computer screen and performing to an invisible public wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to connect in a wider way.
Alaa wanted to test what it would mean to use technology to open up channels of knowledge-making and discourse. It was a political quest, with a technological framework and a philosophical approach. We hatched a plan, and one year later, gathered a group of techies who also happened to be artists, organizers, writers and thinkers from across the Arab World. It was our first encounter thinking and organizing intersectionally, breaking categories open to smuggle knowledge from one sector into another: technology to politics, philosophy to technology, technology to art and journalism, and so on. Our newborn community boasted members from Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Bahrain and Lebanon among other places. We met again in Beirut, then Cairo. You could say it was a kind of dress rehearsal for the Arab Spring.
When the Tunisian revolution erupted in December of 2010, I was with Alaa in Pretoria, South Africa. He had moved there in 2008 to work on software localization — a technology he was militant about. He wanted to see an Internet where Arabic content flowed seamlessly, as if it was its native language; the Internet being, back then, a possible site for an embodied universality. When news broke of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the protests that followed, I cut my trip short and rushed back home, with a plan to get to Tunisia however I could.
But the wave of Arab uprisings was moving faster than flights, and Egypt’s own revolution broke out on January 25. Like many protestors, I was beaten by the police that day; I had the distinct pleasure of having my glasses broken. Later that night, I jokingly wrote to Alaa about the chaotic and unflattering scene he had missed, of me being beaten up, losing a shoe and, most importantly, my glasses — and my vision with them. We agreed that, out of that blur, something was emerging; a few days later, Alaa would pack up his things and return home. At the time, home was Tahrir Square.
Some days later, after the president had fallen, the government had fallen, the parliament had fallen, and the constitution had fallen, I met Alaa in Tahrir Square. He was carrying around a sheet of paper, a laundry list of demands for revolutionary change. As events progressed, he was striking out items and scribbling new ones, ever attentive to the needs of the developing situation.
Alaa continued to work with diverse groups in the months to come — students, activists, journalists, techies, artists. He taught workshops on how to write political statements as poetic acts and coached young people to breathe life into the formulaic informational space of Wikipedia with homegrown narratives; he led meetings on how practicing politics online — as opposed to through organized parties — had restored a space for emotion in political life.
One of Alaa’s notable initiatives was Let’s Write Our Own Constitution, which grew out of his time living in and learning about South Africa. He had endless admiration for the South African experience with the Freedom Charter, which had been assembled through the active involvement of the public. Alaa dreamt of smuggling Kilptown’s democratic experiment to Egypt, where citizens, clustered in their communities, would convene to write parts of a new collective constitution.
In the months that followed, there were many setbacks to the revolutionary triumphalism that we experienced in the early days of 2011. But it wasn’t until 2013 that we witnessed a full reversal: a military coup. I was working for the daily paper Al-Masry al-Youm at that time, and as an act of censorship, my newspaper’s management decided to pull our funding. Alongside 25 journalist colleagues, I was suddenly jobless. I quickly had an intuition that things were going to get violent, politically, and I asked Alaa to help us build a website to house our displaced journalism; a place to bear witness to what was to come.
Alaa spent days and nights with his partner Manal writing code for our new website. I spent that same time hiding from my own anxiety by playing with Alaa and Manal’s son Khaled on the couch beside them. Khaled was almost one by then. He had been born when the revolution was ascendant, but things were uncertain now, and in my gut I knew the project would come face-to-face with forces that would want to suppress our voices.
By the time our website, Mada Masr, was up and running on June 30, 2013, the military was in power and Alaa was in prison again. Somehow, he managed to finish the work, developing our code in smuggled letters filled with instructions shared during prison visits. Over the course of a decade, alongside the articles we published in Mada, another sustained archive of the military’s violent cancelation of public politics came to be: the letters we sent to Alaa and the letters we received back.
Alaa’s handwriting in the letters is barely legible, and reading them is an exercise in deciphering. Sometimes I do it with our common friend, Sarah. The exercise reminds me of an image described by Frantz Fanon of Algerians in the late 1950s, trying to tune into the jammed transmissions of the revolutionaries broadcasting as the Voice of Free Algeria. We would read the letters aloud together, which turned into a spiritual ritual of sorts, summoning Alaa, making him present through his voice.
At times, the two archives — of Mada and the letters — converged. Alaa’s first years of imprisonment, starting in 2013, were marked by a determination that his voice would transcend confinement. His body was incarcerated, but his voice was fugitive. Unconstrained by his cramped conditions, he summoned profound depth to write for us at the magazine and as well in his personal letters, about failure as teacher, progress as ideology, Palestine as universal politics.
In his later years of imprisonment, Alaa began to address his own predicament, universalizing his plight as a prisoner to call for solidarity with the incarcerated around the world. Underlying his writing was the belief that we too could become prisoners like him one day; that states ultimately survive by preserving their right to enact power over our bodies. In 2017, he wrote these words: “I am in prison because those in power want to make an example of some of us. Let us be an example then, but on our own terms. The war on meaning in the rest of the world is not over yet. Let us be an example, not a cautionary tale.”
Two years later, he vividly described the violence of incarceration: “The cruelest form of humiliation for new prisoners is known as the parade. New inmates crawl on the ground between two rows of policemen, who unleash a torrent of kicks, blows, and insults on the crawling people,” he wrote. Alaa did not do it to invite us to pity him, but rather, to show how the regime’s power was reinforced by the negation of dissident voices and bodies. Our collective political failure meant that the body — Alaa’s in this case — had become the ultimate site of resistance.
In 2023, Alaa went on a 220-day hunger strike calling for freedom, which he eventually escalated to a water strike. He very nearly died. In a letter to his family, he writes about being roused from unconsciousness to find himself in the arms of his cellmates. Some held his head with care, others held his back. In their terrified eyes, he saw their anguish at the possibility of losing him. It was this intimate experience of solidarity with his fellow inmates that restored Alaa’s attachment to life.
In 1933, Bertolt Brecht wrote a pamphlet addressed to anti-fascist German peers from his exile in Denmark, in which he spoke about the courage of recognizing the truth when it is hidden — and the skill of turning that truth into something we can fight with, and getting it into hands that can spread and use the knowledge.
Alaa’s writings — his letters and essays — are like revelatory artifacts, containing a kind of truth. Through the years of friendship I am so privileged to have with Alaa, I’ve come to recognize him as one of Brecht’s courageous truth-seekers, whose findings have the power to unleash the political imagination. He is a teacher whose pedagogy keeps giving, both through his words and, all too often, through his silences.