A hunger strike two continents apart, linking mother and son

Washington Post

6 days ago

Abdelrahman ElGendy is a writer and translator from Cairo.
Every night, I go to sleep with one thought on my mind: Laila Soueif might not live to see the morning.
Eight months into a hunger strike to free her son, Alaa Abdel Fattah, — the Egyptian activist who is arguably the most well-known political prisoner in the Arab world — doctors at St Thomas' Hospital in London have warned Laila's family that she is at risk of sudden death. She has already lost more than 40 percent of her body weight.
Alaa was a central figure of Egypt's 2011 revolution: A software developer, blogger and activist, he has spent much of his life since that time behind bars for his dissent, most recently serving a five-year sentence for the crime of sharing a social media post about torture in an Egyptian prison.
I know Alaa by reputation; he epitomizes the hopes of a generation of freedom-seeking Egyptians. I also know him because we spent time in the same prison. Alaa had been moved to our prison in 2019 after his latest arrest, placed one floor below mine. We'd all heard what they had done to him: the beatings, the torture. They kept him sealed off, and, on rare visitation days, he saw his family from behind glass. It was around that time that I first met Laila, by chance, in the prison hall. She enveloped me in a bear hug. She was there to see her son.
Nearly six years later, Alaa remains in prison. On the day he was due for release — Sept. 29, 2024 — Laila began a hunger strike to protest his continued unlawful detention.
Following her most recent hospitalization, on May 29, support has surged from across the globe for the 69-year-old mathematics professor. Many rightfully rage at the Egyptian regime, which continues to hold her son, months after the end of his second five-year sentence, and despite a U.N. panel's conclusion that his ongoing detention is illegal; and at the British government — whose citizenship Laila and her children hold — for its hollow, ineffectual gestures in trying to secure Alaa's release. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's lukewarm, robotic statements have consistently lacked the urgency that Laila's impending death demands.
To those who've only heard of Laila Soueif now, she may seem merely a grieving mother desperate to save her imprisoned son. But Laila bears a history of her own.
Laila is a small woman, modest in dress and tone. There's no noise to her, no flash. And yet she commands the room.
Born into a politically engaged intellectual family — her father was Mostafa Soueif, a pioneering psychologist, and her mother, Fatma Moussa, a leading Shakespeare scholar — Laila was from an early age steeped in traditions of justice and dissent. Her older sister, Ahdaf Soueif, is an acclaimed novelist, public intellectual and founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laila herself became politically active as a teenager during the student uprisings of the early 1970s against Anwar Sadat's regime. It was through activism that she met her late husband, Ahmed Seif Al Islam, one of Egypt's most prominent leftist lawyers and a four-time political prisoner under both Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.
For decades, Laila has been at the heart of nearly every major wave of protest in Egypt, from student sit-ins and academic freedom campaigns to the anti-Mubarak Kefaya movement, and the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. In 2003, she co-founded the March 9 Professors Movement, calling for an end to state control over academic life. While raising three children — Mona, Alaa and Sanaa — who would each go on to become activists themselves, she remained a cornerstone of Egypt's struggle for liberation.
Alaa once wrote, 'From my mother, I inherited a stone cake,' invoking the iconic Amal Dunqul poem 'The Stone Cake,' a searing tribute to the 1972 student uprising, when protesters flooded Cairo's Tahrir Square and gathered around the stone base of an unfinished monument to oppose Sadat's 'no war, no peace' policy. Dunqul's poem, uncannily prophetic, has often been read as if written for the revolutionaries of 2011, who returned to that same square to call for the end to Mubarak's dictatorship.
Alaa, in other words, is part of a long lineage of revolt. His struggle for liberation is Laila's, too.
And now — as he endures a second hunger strike from prison, this one in solidarity with his fading mother — the pair is locked in a deadly alliance.
For eight months, Laila has flown between London and Cairo, shivering at protests and speaking at news conferences in bustling squares and even from her own living room. In between, she records interviews, writes letters, and stares down Goliath and his foot soldiers — vowing to continue until her son is free.
Laila's hunger strike has stirred long-dormant corners of public life. Egyptian mothers are calling for solidarity rallies. Egyptian campuses that had long gone quiet are once again humming with calls demanding Alaa's release and action to save Laila's life.
Like every fragile, insecure dictatorship, the Egyptian regime despises the appearance of yielding to pressure. Laila understands the threat these ripples pose. So, she left them no excuses. She appealed. She filed pardon requests, knocked on every door. She gave the regime every avenue to act while preserving its brittle ego.
Three days after her most recent hospitalization, I froze at a post her daughter Mona made on Facebook for Lana's birthday — Mona's daughter and Laila's granddaughter. My eyes blurred as I read through the details: St. Thomas' Hospital's lobby turned into a celebration hall. But it was the photograph that stopped me: Mona laughing, crinkling the corners of her tired eyes. Little Lana, staring off to the edge of the frame, caught by something unseen. The face of Sanaa — Laila's other daughter — earlier clenched with grief at a news conference outside the hospital, now unguarded, softened into a contagious smile.
And, at the center of it all: Laila, draped in a beige sweater her body no longer could fill, leaning into her younger daughter, arm hooked around her elbow. A grin on her lips — briefly, impossibly — the Laila from before.
Over the course of a decade and more, the family has been thrust into the consuming role of human rights activists, an identity Laila says they have never sought.
Looking at Mona's picture, I could glimpse what they — after decades of prison cells, torture, waiting games and sacrifice — yearn for: a quiet, ordinary life. A chance to be a family again.
And yet the Egyptian regime insists on deepening its legacy of repression, and Britain withholds the full weight of its influence. The Egyptians in particular seem to have one aim in this story: to silence Laila once and for all. What they've yet to grasp: They have already failed.
Amal Dunqul wrote in 'The Stone Cake':
Five o'clock struck
with soldiers a circle of shields and helmets
drawing closer slowly … slowly …
from every direction
and the singers in the stone cake clenching
and relaxing
like a heartbeat!