Alaa and wife, Manal, with new baby in January 2012 On prisons as sites of violations, extremism and boredom
Friday, August 21, 2015 By Ahdaf Souief Alaa Abd El Fattah, outspoken software tecchie, blogger and political activist, has spoken to the media for the first time since he began serving his latest sentence at Tora Prison. Abd El Fattah is serving a five-year prison sentence for being at a civil gathering in front of the Shura Council in November 2013 to protest a constitutional provision allowing the military to court-martial civilians.
Alia Mossallam Mada Masr, Wednesday, September 17, 2014 About a month ago I went to visit a friend in prison.
It doesn’t matter who he or she was, since there are now hundreds of young men and women in Egypt’s prisons because of the new Protest Law. The prisons are full to the brim with teenagers, students, fathers, brothers, daughters and only sons.
WIAM EL-TAMAMI 28 JANUARY 2015 I left Cairo on 19 April 2014. I was so glad to have left, so relieved and slightly disbelieving that I had finally loosened myself from the grip of Al-Qaahira – in Arabic the name, quite fittingly, means ‘The Oppressor’, ‘The Crusher’, ‘The Vanquisheress’.
I knew that I could not be there then, but that I was inextricably bound to her: I could, I would, always come back.
