The British-Egyptian human rights activist and writer, released from more than a decade in continuous detention in Cairo, has said he wants to come to the UK to be with his autistic 14-year-old son.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah said he feared his mother might have died on hunger strike during the 12 years he spent in what he described as a “vortex of incarceration”.
In an interview from Cairo, Abd el-Fattah also said he needed a pause in his human rights campaigning to give himself time to heal, adding he no longer believed prison was a necessary rite of passage on the route to freedom.
Smiling and joking in a Steve Biko T-shirt, he said he felt surprisingly well but needed time to find himself after so long either in solitary confinement or isolated in jail.
About the British government’s efforts to secure his release, he said simply: “We did manage to get me out but we did not manage to get a consular visit. That still does not make sense to me. But that might be on the previous government. This one might have inherited the situation.”
He also thanked those in the UK who had campaigned for his release and given strength to his own family, lightly referencing Margaret Thatcher’s claim that society did not exist in the UK. “It does exist and my family has experienced it,” he said.
Abd el-Fattah rose to prominence as one of the most compelling voices of the Arab spring in 2011, but has spent most of his time in prison since 2014, the year after President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi came to power in a military coup.
In 2014, a court sentenced him to five years in prison for participating in a demonstration about the outlawing of protest. In September 2019, only six months after he had been released on nightly probation, he was arrested again and held in pre-trial detention for more than two years. He was convicted in December 2021 of “spreading false news” for sharing a post about a prisoner dying of torture, and handed another five-year sentence.
His 69-year-old mother, Laila, based in London and Cairo, went on two hunger strikes lasting 287 days and was twice hospitalised in London.
He said: “There were long periods of despair when I did not think I was going to be released. Then there were long periods of despair when I was not sure whether I was going to survive and I was not sure whether my mother was going to survive, and I was not sure I would want to survive if my mother did not survive.”
He said the relationship with his Brighton-based 14-year-old autistic son Khaled is his most important preoccupation. He said: “He is with me now. He has taken a few weeks off from school. We are hanging out together, we go swimming, we go rowing, we are sleeping in the same room so there is some serious bonding, trying to catch up, build a new connection. His mother has been amazing. I do not know how she did that, but he was ready for me. There was no estrangement.”
For most of the time in jail, Abd el-Fattah did not see his son since the visits were short and behind glass, and it was not suitable for someone on the autism spectrum.
“In the six years I have been in prison I have seen him a handful of times,” he said. “We hit it off immediately and I am looking forward to seeing him in Brighton, and understanding his world there because it is completely new to me.
“I was aware of the campaign and my mother’s conditions, albeit with time delays. I am candid in prison visits. My family is candid. We talked freely even though they are always listening in. It is better than having secrets.”
He said he thought his mother might die, “not because either government wanted that outcome, but their sense of time has nothing to do with how time operates for people caught up in this vortex of incarceration. They were moving at a speed that had nothing to do with what was going on with me or my mother.
“I was seriously worried about her. I was also worried about her sustaining some form of permanent damage that compromised her health for the future.”
Asked what freedom felt like, he said: “It is overwhelming. It is also comfortable and natural, and I am immediately fitting in with them, including witnessing three family fights in two days. The usual stuff. It is wonderful to be back, and going to visit other family houses. It is wonderful to be back in that. That is what I have missed the most. This connection with family, with children, catching up on who has had how many children. And my mum, I think, is happy to open my door and see that I am sleeping there, and am just there. I don’t have to do anything.”
Discussing his plans for the future and whether he will risk political activism in Egypt again, he says: “I deserve to heal. I deserve to take time to heal. I have a political mind. I don’t always need to be an organiser.
after newsletter promotion
“I am not passionate about organising. What I have grown passionate about is the analytical side of things, thinking about politics and talking about politics. So I am not going to stop, but I do not know what shape it is going to take. It is definitely going to involve writing, but there is no opportunity for organising in Egypt and it is too dangerous at the moment. It is also the world right now – with what is happening in Palestine, and we seem to have gone down a dead end with climate change.
“It is difficult to imagine what a single voice can do. It is time for deep reflection and new modalities of engaging with things, and to try to find new modalities for freedom. I was stuck for too long in prison so I didn’t really get a chance to think about it… but in my last free moments I was stuck in an inherited position in which one could easily believe the road to freedom was through prison – and I don’t think that works.
“What is activism without putting yourself in harm’s way? Maybe I’m middle-aged and maybe I need to admit to it, and be a dad and a dad activist. I don’t know. I need to think differently, to think less locally because I am going to be in the UK, and the deadlock in the world right now is not resolvable from a place like Egypt – though I think there is benefit in having a perspective from a place like Egypt because there is a deadlock of imagination in the global north, and a deadlock in the possibility of action in the global south.”
He stressed: “But I don’t have any notions that I am going to be a major intellectual, it’s just a question of how do I engage with the world and what’s my place in it? I am not imagining the world is waiting for me to change things. It’s possible that what I have to say is how to live with defeat, or how to live with despair, or how to champion a lost cause. I do not think there is such a thing as a victory even for the rich. They are stuck in an imaginary where we are going to cease to exist. But we are not going to cease to exist.
“I think we have got to stop thinking about victories and start thinking about how the hell we are going to live with each other, how are we going to live with the world we have inherited and the world we have constructed and keep constructing. The only way to make the world a kinder place is to champion these lost causes.”
He recounts how the confusion surrounding the tumultuous day of his release from jail led to him being locked out of his home. “We were being told it was a matter of days that I would be released in late July and after three weeks it became very frustrating and humiliating so I was not sure what was going on. In this world there are black boxes and elephants all the way down, not knowing what is going on.
“I was cooking and apparently on the ticker on the TV screen there was an item that I had been given a presidential pardon. We did not see it until we sat down to eat. We froze the frame and called the prison guard. I was saying: ‘Call the warden, it says I am being released. I want to have a shower,’ and then they were ready and then it was process, process, waiting for my paperwork.”
Cairo’s Wadi al-Natrun prison complex has many exit points and he did not know his family were already waiting outside. “I thought there was some arrangement so there was no media circus and my family would be waiting at home. The [officers] drove me to my local police station,” he said.
The prison guards did not want him leaving in prison clothes so agreed to buy him some civilian clothes. “So they bought me a nice white shirt. It’s Cairo, so you can buy things at midnight.
“One of the officers drove me from the station and dropped me off at the house. He asked: ‘Do you want to check if there is anyone upstairs?’ and I said: ‘No, it’s OK, I am home.’ He left. I went upstairs, and there was no one, so I hung out and talked with the shopkeepers and neighbours until I found someone with a phone to ring my family to say I was home. They were two hours away outside the prison gates. So I spent two hours talking to the pharmacist and neighbours. The Cairo street scene and the kindness of people felt like freedom. I was wearing civilian clothes among civilians. I did not have money, I did not have a phone, but I was home.”
He admits he cannot know what secured his release after so many reverses. “Ultimately what mattered to us was that there was a broad community in the public and it was very British and very supportive and that also inspired Egyptians to feel more bold in expressing their solidarity. Activists, artists, people in the media and MPs. It was broad and communal. I did not know it all because I was isolated but I could see its impact on my family and on the way I was treated in prison. It still took putting my own body on the line and my mother putting her own body on the line, all the way to the limit. It took a lot of brilliant organising.
“We could not have done it without that support, and given the UK is still a democracy I would rather there wasn’t this very binary mentality of the state and society being two separate things – this is too partisan, talking about society, since Margaret Thatcher said society does not exist – but it does. If there was ever a question about whether British society exists, my family has experienced it in this campaign. It does exist.”
