ON OCTOBER 27, 2014, Laila Soueif and her oldest daughter, Mona, climbed the short row of steps leading to the main entrance of the Egyptian supreme court building, then stopped and sat beside one of its stone columns. From her backpack, Laila drew out a small sign written on cardboard. It announced she and her daughter were going to intensify the partial hunger strike they had begun in September to protest the injustices committed against their family. They would remain there off and on for the next forty-eight hours, taking no food or liquids.
“The idea wasn’t to kill ourselves,” Laila explained, “but to draw attention to what the Sisi regime was doing. It was the only weapon we had left.” As for its efficacy, she was matter-of-fact. “A few people passing signaled that they supported us—sometimes quite a subtle signal.”
Adding another layer of pain to the experience, it came at a time when Laila’s family was, quite literally, disappearing before her eyes.
The first sign that the Sisi regime was to take a much dimmer view than its predecessors of dissent to its rule came with Alaa’s arrest in late November 2013. Rather than being released on bail to await trial, he and his twenty-four codefendants were held for the next four months. In a tactic apparently designed to break his will, Alaa’s release on bail in March 2014 had been followed by his rearrest three months later.
If average Egyptians were alarmed by the deepening repression in their country—less than a year after Sisi took power, there were already far more political prisoners in Egypt’s jails than there had ever been under Mubarak—they gave scant evidence of it. In presidential elections that May, Sisi, now officially retired from the military, won with more than 96 percent of the vote. While this surely wasn’t a wholly accurate reflection of his popularity—between those political parties that had been banned and those that boycotted the election, Sisi faced only token opposition—even an ardent opponent like Laila Soueif recognized that the former general enjoyed widespread support. She had even seen it among many of her friends and university coworkers. “They had this idea that, ‘Okay, maybe he’s a little rough, but he saved us from the Islamists,’ ” she said. “That’s all they cared about, all they saw.”
Until then, Laila’s youngest daughter, the twenty-two-year-old Sanaa, had avoided the family tradition of run-ins with the law. On June 21, 2014, that changed. Increasingly infuriated by the treatment of her brother and Egypt’s other political prisoners, Sanaa joined a human rights rally in Cairo. Within minutes, she was arrested on precisely the same charge as her brother: violating the protest law.
Even under the tightening Sisi regime, members of the Cairene upper class like Sanaa enjoyed a degree of immunity—the main enemies of the state, after all, were the working-class followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they were to be ruthlessly hunted down—but when brought before a magistrate, the college student took a bold step. Despite suggestions from the judge that she stay quiet, Sanaa insisted that she had been a chief organizer of the rally and refused to sign her statement until this detail was included. “She wasn’t going to let them do the usual thing of letting the high-profile activists go and pound on the lesser-known ones,” Laila said. For this principled stand, Sanaa, like her older brother, was held in jail pending trial.
For Ahmed Seif, Egypt’s preeminent human rights lawyer, it had meant that his ever-expanding roster of clients now included two of his own children. At a news conference the previous January, the former political prisoner took the microphone to eloquently address his imprisoned son, Alaa. “I wanted you to inherit a democratic society that guards your rights, my son, but instead I passed on the prison cell that held me, and now holds you.” By June, that haunting message applied equally to his youngest daughter.
Soon, matters turned even darker for the family of Laila Soueif. Long in frail health, Ahmed had been scheduled for open-heart surgery at the end of August; on the sixteenth of that month, he suddenly collapsed and then fell into a coma. Only after intense lobbying by both influential Egyptians and international human rights organizations did the Sisi regime grant Alaa and Sanaa afternoon furloughs to visit their father before he died.
“And that was the absolute worst day,” Laila said, “maybe the worst day of my life. Sanaa was being held in a police station, so we had been able to see her and tell her what was going on, but Alaa had no idea. He showed up at the hospital with flowers for Ahmed, so I had to take him aside to say his father was in a coma. He said, ‘So he won’t even know I’m here, then,’ and just threw the flowers out.”
The day after that hospital visit, Alaa went on a hunger strike in his cell. On August 28, the day of her father’s funeral, Sanaa stopped eating also. A week later, Laila and Mona announced their partial hunger strike.
In light of both Ahmed’s death and the family’s prominence, many observers believed that Alaa and Sanaa would be shown leniency by the courts. That belief was misplaced. On October 26, 2014, Sanaa was sentenced to three years in prison for violating the protest law. The next day, Laila and Mona took to the courthouse steps for their intensified hunger strike. Laila braced herself for more bad news when Alaa went to trial the following month, by remembering something her husband had said.
“Because Ahmed had spent so much time in courtrooms and knew what certain things meant,” she said, “he was always very accurate in his predictions. Before he died, when he was still representing Alaa, he told me, ‘Prepare yourself, because they’re going to give him five years.’ ”