AS KHULOOD WAS planning her escape from Iraq in April 2005, Laila Soueif was escalating her opposition to the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
By then, Laila and her husband, Ahmed Seif, had been Egypt’s most celebrated political dissident couple for well over a decade, serving as constant nuisances to the Mubarak government. Since his release from prison in 1989, Ahmed had become the nation’s preeminent human rights lawyer, the champion of an eclectic array of defendants in politically motivated cases that included leftist university professors, Islamic fundamentalists, and—in a nation where homosexuality remains effectively illegal—members of Cairo’s gay community. When I first met him that autumn, Ahmed was involved in perhaps the most controversial case of his career, defending a group of men accused of complicity in a 2004 hotel bombing in the Sinai Peninsula that left thirty-one dead.
For her part, and even while retaining her mathematics professorship at Cairo University, Laila had gained a reputation as one of Cairo’s most indefatigable “street” leaders, the veteran of countless protest marches against the regime. Part of what drove her was a keen awareness that, as a member of the Cairene professional class, she enjoyed a freedom to dissent that was all but denied to Egypt’s poor and working class.
“Historically,” she said, “that bestowed a degree of immunity—the security forces really didn’t like to mess with us, because they didn’t know who in the power structure we could call up—but that also meant we had a responsibility, to be a voice for those who are silenced. And being a woman helped, too. In this culture, women just aren’t taken that seriously, so it allows you to do things that men can’t.”
But Laila was also quite aware that her activism—and the government’s grudging tolerance of it—fit neatly into the divide-and-rule strategy that Hosni Mubarak had employed since assuming power in 1981. In the past, Egyptian governments had been able to gin up bipartisan support when needed by playing the anti-West, anti-Israel card, but Anwar Sadat had traded that card away by making peace with Israel and going on the American payroll. The new strategy under Mubarak consisted of allowing an expanded level of political dissent among the small, urban educated elite, while swiftly moving to crush any sign of growing influence by the far more numerous—and therefore, far more dangerous—Islamists.
The regime was greatly aided in this effort in the mid-1990s when a radical Islamist group, Al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya, launched a terror campaign, culminating in a horrific knife and machine-gun attack on tourists at Luxor’s Hatshepsut Temple in November 1997 that left sixty-two dead. In response, Egyptian security forces launched a scorched-earth campaign against Al-Gamma’a and its alleged sympathizers across the country, killing hundreds and imprisoning tens of thousands more. That bloody episode sent an implicit warning to Mubarak’s liberal opponents that, if their agitation for political reform got out of hand, what waited in the wings was not parliamentary democracy but religious fanaticism. Also hearing that warning was the American government, by then subsidizing the Egyptian regime to the tune of some $2 billion a year.
In Laila’s estimation, what finally caused this strategy to fray was the launch of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel in September 2000. With most Egyptians of all political persuasions holding to the conviction that their government had sold out the Palestinians with the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, Mubarak was suddenly powerless to muzzle pro-Palestinian demonstrations lest he be seen as an even greater lackey of the Americans. “For the first time,” Laila explained, “we began organizing openly and publicly without taking any permission from the government and without taking cover under any of the so-called legitimate political parties. And what was the government going to do about it? This established the pattern—you don’t wait for permission, you don’t look for an existing political party to take you in, you just organize—that we used many, many times afterward.”
In short order, street protests became a constant feature of Egyptian life. Even more deleterious from the regime’s point of view, fury over the Palestinian situation galvanized opposition groups from across the political spectrum to march and work together.
With this new dynamic in place, the last thing Hosni Mubarak needed was another reminder to the Egyptian people of his fealty to Washington—but then came the United States’ decision to invade Iraq.
While astute enough to oppose that invasion in public, and to engage in high-profile diplomacy to try to head it off, Mubarak wasn’t able to escape its fallout. In the eyes of many Egyptians, after twenty-two years of taking lucre from the Americans, the dictator was simply too much their puppet to make a show of independence now. That cynical view only hardened as the war in Iraq dragged on and the daily body count mounted. From 2002 through early 2005, some of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the Arab world were taking place in the streets of Cairo, and Laila Soueif was on the front lines in nearly every one of them. “Of course, on the overt level, it was to protest what was occurring in Iraq,” Laila said, “but this also reflected the failure of Mubarak.”
At the same time, the dictator did himself few favors with a series of domestic initiatives that further inflamed the opposition. Grooming his son Gamal as his successor, in February 2005, Mubarak engineered a rewriting of the constitution that, while ostensibly allowing for direct presidential elections, actually rigged the system so as to make domination by his political party all but perpetual. In presidential elections that September, Mubarak won a fifth six-year term with nearly 89 percent of the vote, after having arrested the only notable candidate to stand against him, Ayman Nour. Under mounting pressure at home and abroad, he reduced his interference in the November 2005 parliamentary elections, only to see the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party still officially banned, take an unprecedented 20 percent of the seats.
By late 2005, when I spent six weeks traveling through Egypt, growing contempt for the government was evident everywhere. To be sure, much of that antipathy derived from the nation’s economic stagnation and from the corruption that had enabled a small handful of politicians and generals to become fabulously rich—the Mubarak family financial portfolio alone was reported to run into the billions—but it also had a strong anti-American component, and pointed up a profound disjuncture. At the same time that Egypt was regarded in Washington as one of the United States’ most reliable allies in the Arab world, due in no small part to its continuing entente with Israel, over the course of scores of interviews with Egyptians of most every political and religious persuasion, I failed to meet a single one who supported the Israeli peace settlement, or who regarded the American financial subsidies to the Mubarak government as anything other than a source of national shame. As Essam el-Erian, the deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood, bluntly told me, “The only politics in Egypt now are the politics of the street, and for anyone to work with the Americans is to write their political death sentence.”
It was during this time of ferment that the three children of Laila Soueif and Ahmed Seif, who previously had shown little interest in activism, began to have a change of heart about politics. The first to make the evolution was their son, Alaa, a pioneering Egyptian blogger, and it happened when he accompanied Laila to a protest march in May 2005.
“He had become very interested in citizen journalism,” Laila said, “so with all the street actions surrounding the constitution and Mubarak running again, he had begun coming down to cover the demonstrations—not to participate, just to report on them.”
But the protest on May 25 was a very different affair. Waiting in ambush were government-hired thugs, or baltagiya who immediately charged at the demonstrators to beat them with fists and wooden staffs. Perhaps recognizing the well-known protester in their midst, the goons soon fell on Laila.
“Well, this was something new,” she said, “for them to punch a middle-aged woman, and when my son saw that, he jumped in to help me.” For his trouble, Alaa was beaten up as well. “He had some toes broken, so we went to hospital, and it was only later that we discovered we were the lucky ones. After we left, the baltagiya began pulling the clothes off women and beating them in their underwear. This was something they did a lot later on, to humiliate, but that was when it began and when Alaa joined the protests. The girls became involved later—Mona got pulled in with the judges’ independence movement, and then for Sanaa, it was the revolution—but for Alaa, it started in 2005.”
Laila Soueif is a tough, unsentimental woman, and if she harbored any pride—or, in light of what was to come, regret—over her children’s turn to activism, she didn’t let on. “I never tried to dissuade them. Even if I had wanted to—and I probably did at times—I didn’t. That kind of thing is useless. They’re not going to listen to you anyway, so you just get into fights.”
Sitting in her Cairo apartment in March 2016, Laila’s sister, the novelist Ahdaf Soueif, had a rather more contemplative view when pondering what has happened to her sister’s family in recent years. “I don’t think anyone sets out to be a martyr, to be a sad cause,” Ahdaf said. “I think you start down a path, and something happens, and then you go a little further and something else happens, and eventually you reach a point where you don’t see any way back, you can only keep going. I think that’s what happened to Laila and Ahmed, and I think that’s what happened to their children, too.”