September 24, 2025, 12:47pm

Image from The Guardian/Reuters

The British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah was reunited with his family on Monday after spending most of the last decade in prison. Abd El-Fattah is one of Egypt’s most prominent writers and dissidents, and a widely known political prisoner. It’s a victory for free speech and a joy for his family. “I cannot believe myself, for sure,” sis sister Sanaa Seif said after his release. “I cannot believe that I’m seeing him here at home among us normally. I guess it will feel more real when we go to sleep, wake up and find him present, and when his son arrives here from traveling. I’m really happy.”

Abd El-Fattah’s aunt, the Booker Prize shortlisted writer Ahdaf Soueif, told Democracy Now! the sweet story of finally hearing from her nephew. When news of Abd El-Fattah’s pardon was announced, his sister and mother drove 90 minutes through the desert to the prison to pick him up, and spent all day waiting for him to emerge. Then his aunt Ahdaf got a call from an unknown number, which she ignored like we all do:

At about 11 p.m., I got a phone call from a number that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t answer it. And then I got a message from that same number saying, “Answer me. This is Alaa.” And I couldn’t believe it. So I called him, and he said—he said, “It’s Alaa. It’s Alaa. Ahdaf, I—where are you?” I said, “Where are you?” He said, “Yeah, I’m out. I’m out. I haven’t moved, but where are you?” He said, “I’m outside the house, and I can’t get in. Where’s my mom?” I said, “Well, your mom is at the prison gates waiting for you.” So, anyway, so then we called my brother, who went round and opened, unlocked the door for him. And friends started coming around. And we called Laila and Sanaa, and they turned around and drove back to meet him.

Hours later, the family was finally reunited.

Abd El-Fattah was most recently imprisoned for six years, over a 2019 Facebook post about the death of an inmate. His five year sentence technically ended last year, but the authorities refused to release him. His pardon came after years of pressure on Egypt’s government from his family, that included long hunger strikes by Abd El-Fattah and his mother, Laila Soueif, who is a professor of math at Cairo University.

Abd El-Fattah is also a British national, and the UK government has been lobbying for his release. In The Guardian, Patrick Wintour wrote that “it appears a growing warmth in British-Egyptian official relations—including over how to handle the Palestine question—may have played a role in the [Egyptian] president’s decision.”

This recent imprisonment was far from Abd El-Fattah’s first brush with the authorities. He has been targeted by multiple Egyptian governments on and off for nearly twenty years, starting with his arrest in 2006 while peacefully protesting. Since then, Abd El-Fattah became a leading voice and outspoken thinker during the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt that brought down Mubarak’s government. His activism and protesting led to repeated harassment and arrest by the subsequent authoritarian leader of Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

A collection of his writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, was compiled by his friends and family with a wonderful introduction by Naomi Klein. In celebration of Abd El-Fattah’s release, the ebook is currently free at Seven Stories Press. It’s well worth your time as a record of a relentless thinker and advocate, and a true free speech warrior. The book collects his writing, social media posts, and blogging in one English-language volume. Some of the text is selected from his voluminous tweeting live from protests and some of the more recent pieces were written from behind bars. As Klein notes in her introduction, at least one piece was written “in collaboration with another political prisoner, the two men shouting ideas to each other across the dark ward.”

There are still a tremendous number of people locked up for their politics in Egypt—estimates are as high as 20,000-60,000 individuals. Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s freedom means there is one fewer, but as his mom told Democracy Now: “Despite our great joy, the biggest joy is when there are no political prisoners. The big and real joy is when there are no political prisoners.”