No phenomenon has more powerfully, and negatively, defined Egyptian political life since the January 25, 2011, uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign than the mass incarceration of citizens by the three governments that have succeeded him: the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (2011–12), President Mohamed Morsi (2012–13) and, most intensely of all, General-turned-President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (2013–present). Indeed, no policy has done more to crush the dreams of contemporary Egyptians and to foreclose the possibility of a democratic future in Egypt.
For a moment, however, the efforts and creativity of the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square seemed to define a new global political imaginary for the twenty-first century, with Tahrir coming to symbolize a seemingly new mode of mass protest heralding successful freedom struggles the world over. Today, the dreams of that revolution have been replaced by prison bars, exile, and in thousands of cases, an early and sometimes unmarked grave. According to a 2020 Carnegie Endowment report, there are at least sixty-five thousand Egyptians—and by some counts at least one hundred thousand—imprisoned for political offenses. The scale of the current prison system is unprecedented: since 2012, the Sisi regime has built upwards of sixty prisons to handle the influx of political detainees, yet prisoners continue to suffer from unprecedented overcrowding. Conditions are atrocious: torture is widespread, as are other forms of abuse; medical attention, such as it exists, is rudimentary, and neglect the rule. It’s not surprising that as many as a thousand prisoners have died in custody since 2011, including high-profile prisoners such as President Morsi and filmmaker Shady Habash. Many others, less well known, have simply disappeared, their deaths unrecorded even for their families.
While no one disputes that in terms of sheer numbers Egypt is undergoing a prison crisis, a Kafkaesque legal system and a network of “dark” or “black” military sites and police jails make it difficult to determine exact figures. Moreover, more than half of these prisoners are being held in “pretrial detention,” a legal state of limbo that often extends far beyond the two-year limit on the detention of citizens held without charges. Similarly, some prisoners find that even when released from prison, they must still undergo years of “precautionary imprisonment,” in which they can be forced to spend half of every day—usually from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.—in the jail cells of local police stations. These restrictions are all based on many of the same emergency laws that ignited the 2011 protests in the first place.
Egypt does not have the world’s highest incarceration rate, which belongs to the United States (although El Salvador, Rwanda, and Cuba also have claims to this ignominious distinction). Indeed, Sisi promised Egyptians he would emulate the United States with his massive prison expansion program. But political imprisonment in Egypt has had an outsized impact on the country’s politics, and through that, its culture. How could it be otherwise, when untold thousands of people have been imprisoned for the “crime” of merely criticizing their government or otherwise expressing their anger and frustration at a system that fundamentally marginalizes and excludes them?
The Jails Are Full
The detention of political dissidents is not new to Egypt. Since its dawn in the nineteenth century, the modern Egyptian state has been a carceral state. Modern Egyptian governance and modern prisons evolved not merely together but through each other.
The carceral state began in Egypt in the aftermath of the 1829 reforms undertaken by Muhammad Ali. It was strengthened with the onset of British rule in 1882; developed further during the post-1922 monarchy, when Egypt was formally independent but still under British control; intensified with the waves of arrests that accompanied the beginning of World War II and then the Palestine War of 1948; and was reconstructed with the 1952 “revolution” and the establishment of the Egyptian republic led by the Free Officers regime.
Whatever the period, from the start, Egypt’s rulers have rarely if ever treated prisoners with anything less than brutality and contempt, a dynamic that became even more prevalent when the prisoners in question belonged to political opponents, whether Islamist, communist, or liberal. Even two hundred years ago, during the reign of Muhammad Ali, a consular report described how “severe heavy-handed arrests and executions have quieted the capital which was on the verge of a rebellion. The jails are full with people from all classes and religions. The population is terrorized.”
Prison was one of the few growth areas of the government as Egypt entered the new decade.
By the time of their arrival in Cairo in 1882, British officials found over a thousand political prisoners serving sentences for such offenses as “assisting the rebels” and “stirring up public feeling against the Khedive [vice-regent].” From the start of British rule, the number of prisoners increased while conditions deteriorated, as the British implemented their infamous policy of a “just measure of pain.” As early as 1884, the British Medical Journal declared that the country’s prisons were “habitations of horrid cruelty,” beset by “shocking” physical conditions, from filth collecting in the facilities to bare grounds, which were “constantly damp from infiltration from the Nile. On this damp ground the prisoners had to sleep, without mats or boards. They were half starved, and imperfectly clothed.”
The use of coerced labor by prisoners was a source of cheap and reliable labor throughout the khedival and British rule. Indeed, as was recognized as early as 1897 in one review of Egyptian prisons at the start of British rule, inmates were already part of the larger attempt to ensure Egypt’s role as one of the world’s most important cotton producers, largely for the benefit of the all-important British textile industry. By the mid-1880s, according to Sir Arthur Griffiths, “An immense amount of good work [was] done by large detachments of convicts.” This use of captured or enslaved people for labor went back millennia in Egypt, but the use of convicts within a specifically penal system of incarceration reflected a core characteristic of modern carcerality—whether with unruly Egyptians or legally emancipated African Americans in the United States—representing a new way both to justify incarcerating large numbers of troublesome and threatening populations and to make them “useful” and profitable to the state and its allies.
However profitable for those in control, Egyptian prisons contained horrors that needed to be brought to public light “for the sake of human beings,” as Ahmed Hilmy Bey, one of Egypt’s first journalists and first political prisoners, declared in his memoir. This would prove exceedingly difficult, as just one decade into the twentieth century the terms of public debate about British rule had been radically limited with the 1909 introduction of the Press and Publications Law, enacted to combat a rising tide of nationalist feeling. This led to the closing of newspapers, the imprisonment of dozens of nationalists for press and political offenses, routine censorship and, ultimately, a core justification for political imprisonment up to the present day.
A Campaign of Arrests
Unable to suppress the nationalist movement, in 1922 the British unilaterally declared Egypt “independent,” although its independence was rather limited—foreign policy and most aspects of the economy remained in British and European hands, while the new constitutional monarchy and parliament were responsible for internal security.
Even as many nationalists were released in the wake of independence, within a year, the newly installed Wafd government, which was in the process of assuming control over the prison administration, began a campaign of arrests of anarchists and members of the nascent Egyptian Communist Party. In so doing, they offered a vivid example of what decolonial philosophers would name the ongoing coloniality of power, something that would define the dysfunctional relationships between ostensibly postcolonial governments like Egypt’s and their citizens to the present day.
The formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, a socioreligious movement blending a conservative reformist message with varying levels of political activism and welfare programs, was perceived as a direct threat to the still unsteady post-“independence” state. It would ultimately generate more surveillance, repression, and imprisonment, especially as Brothers and nationalists joined the rising tide of nationalist sentiment across the region at the moment Britain and Europe were heading toward a new world war—which, not surprisingly, demanded even greater surveillance and increasing incarceration (including of thousands of “enemy” Europeans). A new kind of martial law was introduced which, whatever the pretense of “constitutional government,” saw more and more cases handled by military courts. This was the beginning of parallel judicial systems of arrest, trial, and imprisonment that still define Egyptian justice today.
The end of six years of world war was followed three years later by an equally shocking and politically devastating war over Palestine in 1948, which led both to the flowering and repression of Islamist, communist, nationalist, and even feminist and working-class movements. Prison was one of the few growth areas of the government as Egypt entered the new decade.
Nasser’s Crackdown
The immediate cause of the July 1952 revolution that established the Republic of Egypt was a British army massacre of Egyptian policemen in Ismailia in January of that year, after they refused to crack down on attacks by insurgents opposed to the continued British military presence. The killings led to an all-out rebellion, along with looting and arson. A declaration of martial law temporarily quelled the situation, but the dissolution of the Wafdist government by King Farouq only increased instability. On July 23, the Free Officers, a clandestine group of dissatisfied army officers from non-elite backgrounds comprising veterans of the 1948–49 Palestine War, launched a coup and within a week had forced Farouq’s abdication. The monarchy was abolished in June of the next year; an agreement for the evacuation of the remaining British forces was completed in 1954 and implemented over the next two years. While the new government released “patriotic” political prisoners, it didn’t release communists, who saw little change in their position, while colonial laws that criminalized forms of political activism, including writing, remained in place.
Despite the support received both from some communists and the Brotherhood, once in power, the Free Officers not only purged their ranks of both but moved to crush their organizations. Relations with the Brotherhood deteriorated even further after the removal of the figurehead of the coup, Muhammad Naguib, by Gamal Abdel Nasser and his more radical allies, as until then the Brotherhood had been allowed to continue to operate after political parties were banned because it was considered an “association” rather than a party.
It quickly became clear that the new order would also rely on the old habits of the carceral state to stamp out political dissent, at least on the left.
In October 1954, the attempted assassination of Nasser in Alexandria by a Brotherhood militant led to a prolonged and intense crackdown against the organization, which the Brotherhood described as “the Ordeal” (al-mihna), recalling the persecution of religious scholars by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun. The crackdown included thousands of arrests, detentions, trials, and dismissals from various positions. Not surprisingly, torture was all too common, and it’s here that what can be described as the “assembly line” of torture (as Human Rights Watch characterized it in a 2017 report) that would define imprisonment in Egypt under the present regime first began. Interviews with former prisoners and archival documentation confirm that its roots can be traced back even further, to khedival and then British rule.
With the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955, an anti-colonial coalition led by Egypt along with India, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia that supported the national self-determination of developing countries and eschewed allying with either the United States or USSR, relations between the government and the communists improved briefly. On the other hand, the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq three years later by a group of pan-Arab officers who were inspired by Egypt’s Free Officers would, ironically, be perceived as a threat to the hegemony of Nasserism, which in turn led to a renewed crackdown on any form of leftist or socialist politics outside official control. Over the next decade, the crackdown would remain more or less constant, with communists shipped off to concentration camps between 1958 and 1965, when the party dissolved itself for most of the next decade. The crackdown on the Brotherhood was even harsher, as epitomized by the execution of Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb in 1966.
The situation became even more dire after the disastrous defeat of Egypt and four other Arab countries by Israel in the June 1967 war. Half a year later, workers, soon joined by students, began large-scale protests. This led to Nasser, and after him Anwar Sadat, placing increased power with the interior minister, who also took more active control over syndicates in order to ensure a wedge between students and workers. The nonmilitary security services quickly grew to become a separate and rival power base within the broader Egyptian security system, one that would be regularly utilized by all Egyptian presidents from then on to ensure their own position by simultaneously strengthening and fragmenting security, intelligence, and policing in the country, using the hodgepodge of agencies as a counterbalance to the military.
From Sadat to Mubarak
The death of Nasser in September 1970 was another turning point for Egypt, both for the country’s politics and its prisons. Nasser’s successor, Sadat, consolidated his grip in May 1971 with a “corrective revolution” (harakat al-tashih) that reversed Nasser’s national liberation rhetoric and removed Sadat’s internal enemies. Just as important, land and labor reforms began to be rolled back, picking up pace in 1973 with the launching of the “Open Door Policy” (infitah) that encouraged foreign investment with incentives that would soon become the hallmarks of neoliberal policies across the Global South. Sadat reduced state subsidies on key commodities while opening up the economy to foreign investment. As would occur in so many other places, these changes not only reversed what gains the poor had achieved under Nasser, they drastically and deleteriously affected millions of Egyptians, workers, and peasants alike.
Like so many leaders who begin their time in power by critiquing the excesses of the previous regime or government, Sadat signaled his distance from Nasser by releasing some political prisoners, encouraging public critique of the torture that had occurred in Nasser’s prisons, and promising a shift away from military tribunals and ostensibly toward the rule of civilian law. However, it quickly became clear that the new order would also rely on the old habits of the carceral state to stamp out political dissent, at least on the left. Many of Nasser’s closest allies soon found themselves incarcerated or exiled during these purges. In detention, they encountered the same leftist enemies they had so vigorously persecuted only a decade before. Shared opposition to Sadat’s embrace of neoliberal capitalism led to a rapprochement between many on the Egyptian left and the Nasserists.
Following Sadat’s assassination by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in October 1981, his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, was installed as president. For the next thirty years, he would rule Egypt under the same emergency laws that were invoked in the wake of Sadat’s death. These laws gravely restricted all sorts of civil liberties—from the right to assemble to press freedoms—effectively stunting the growth and blunting the power of social and oppositional movements. While prison maintained its central governing function during the Mubarak years, from the late 1980s on, its focus was on jihadist activists and their sympathizers.
During the 1990s, Mubarak’s main governance projects included painful economic reforms under the banner of International Monetary Fund-imposed “structural adjustment policies,” including privatizing public/state-owned companies (which, as in so many other developing countries, in practice meant turning them over to key members of the regime and the military/security system), cutting social services, loosening exchange rates, and lowering tariffs. Not surprisingly, this coincided with a “war on terror” against “radical Islamic” violence, an effort that involved a brutal counterinsurgency inspired by Algeria’s war against the Islamic Salvation Front movement and then the Armed Islamic Group.
To offset widespread dissatisfaction, Mubarak compensated for his political crackdown by liberalizing the country’s political system, albeit only on the surface. The regime allowed certain loyal opposition parties to operate, as well as a semi-independent press that still answered to a censor’s office. By the early 2000s, a different political playing field had come into being. Dissidents had access to independent satellite broadcasters, nongovernmental press venues, and the internet. Similarly, a new generation of activists had emerged, some mobilized by solidarity with the second Palestinian Intifada and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, others by critique of the corruptions of Mubarak’s kleptocracy. Still others engaged in a new language of civil society and judicial independence in order to urge pro-democracy reforms, and some by all three developments.
Though illegal, public protests became increasingly common and were “managed”—that is, funneled into side streets—as often as they were repressed. The growing repression even in the midst of a much-ballyhooed liberalization program is exemplified by the experiences of famed sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who wound up visiting Tora Prison—a sprawling complex located in southern Cairo—as a researcher in the 1970s and 1980s and then again as a human rights activist in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to find himself there once more, as an inmate, in the 2000s. Another important example is former senator and presidential candidate Ayman Nour, who dared to run in the presidential election in 2005, when Mubarak opened the election to opposition candidates for the first time, only to be imprisoned for five years soon thereafter under false charges of forgery.
Both of these well-known figures were badly mistreated in jail, suffering beatings and medical neglect; the headquarters of Ayman Nour’s al-Ghad Party was the target of arson attacks in 2009 and 2013. Their families also suffered surveillance and bullying by security forces. For the vast majority of prisoners with no visibility, the situation was far, far worse.
A Slow Death
In 2011, Amnesty International described Egypt’s prisons as a “corrosive system of detention.” At the time, Human Rights Watch’s 2010 country report on Egypt estimated that there were between five thousand and ten thousand people being held in prison without charge, another three to four thousand in pretrial detention, and a handful of journalists in jail. The number of security police required to manage this system of state violence and detention was over a hundred thousand.
The situation a dozen years later is, literally, exponentially worse. Data from the World Prison Brief paints a grim picture: upwards of 119,000 prisoners, 31 percent of them pretrial detainees, in at least seventy-eight prisons. Torture is a regular feature of this system, and Egypt remains the only UN member state to be the subject of two public inquiries by the United Nations Committee against Torture, which in a June 2017 report declared that the facts gathered by the committee “lead to the inescapable conclusion that torture is a systematic practice in Egypt.”
If the number of prisoners is shocking, the conditions of imprisonment are even more so: torture and beatings are ubiquitous.
In some sense, the present moment is merely an extension of a longer history: now as before, imprisonment remains one of the main techniques of control, and thus rule. And yet, in terms of its scope and intensity, the present-day system marks a quantitative and qualitative break with earlier eras—quantitative in the sheer numbers imprisoned; qualitative in the systematicity and even scientific application of torture, abuse, and neglect.
The large number of imprisoned Egyptians comprises many types of prisoners: arrestees and those held in investigative, or pretrial, detention; those serving sentences of various kinds; those who have completed their sentences but have not been released; those who have been released into administrative house arrest; those who have (been) disappeared while in detention; those held incommunicado; and those unaccounted for and feared dead as a result of murder, torture, and/or lack of medical attention. While much of the focus of activists is on political prisoners, anyone publicly challenging the official conservative morality sponsored by the government can also wind up spending years in prison.
If the number of prisoners is shocking, the conditions of imprisonment are even more so: torture and beatings are ubiquitous, beginning with the tashrifa, the collective beating new prisoners suffer before even getting to their cells. It has been refined to an art, with prison guards beginning a session with merely the flick of a cigarette. Overcrowding is rife and poses serious health risks; medical care is inhumanly inadequate. Together, they indicate a massive violation of international legal norms for detention and imprisonment, a violation taking place each and every day. In terms of scale and misery, today’s conditions are worse than at any time in Egypt’s modern history (and likely long before that), a “slow death” that makes its current carceral regime among the most criminal in the world.
The ongoing violence and repression also highlight the success of the Sisi regime’s efforts: it has subdued a revolution, carried out a coup, immobilized millions of protesters and thousands of dissidents, and consolidated domestic and international support, power, and capital, all in the space of a decade. The direct relationship between the level of repression and success in remaining a full partner in the global strategic-military-security complex—evidenced equally by the ongoing success of countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among other regional powers—reminds us just how entrenched rationality, strategic expediency, and remunerative carceral political economies remain across the region a decade after millions risked everything to tear this system down.
The Role of the Prison
It should be evident by now that there is a carceral through-line from the colonial period to the post-independence period, from the English administrator Lord Cromer to Nasser, from Sadat to Mubarak and Sisi. All of them reproduced the same pronounced style of governance, what we would term a carceralocracy, and unabashedly developed it to fit their own ends. Egyptian rulers have always relied on the prison and its attendant violence as their key tool of governance.
The current Egyptian regime has adopted a security-state model ostensibly necessitated by an open-ended war on “terrorism,” whether against anyone who has ever had anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood (which potentially includes tens of millions of Egyptians), against the majority of the population of the Sinai, or against any Egyptian who dares criticize the regime or violate “public morals.” Sadly, none of these policies are unique to Egypt; most authoritarian regimes follow a similar pattern, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Equally important—and typical today—is the fact that the Sisi regime has strengthened its policies of austerity (for the vast majority of non-elite citizens) through privatization and cuts to subsidies of basic goods, services, infrastructure, and other once-core elements of the now erstwhile “authoritarian bargain.” Simultaneously, it has made large increases in government building projects, from an extension of the Suez Canal to a massive new administrative capital, that will bring new revenues to the political/military and economic elite while safely isolating them further from the majority of citizens.
While the Mubarak regime often, but by no means generally, tolerated limited forms of protest (at least by young people) and the process of elections as a safety valve that helped head off broader unrest, this strategy clearly failed with the eruption of the 2011 uprising. No doubt hoping to avoid a similar fate, over the past decade the regime has instituted a total crackdown on any form of dissent, including on the part of students, who are now imprisoned at the slightest hint of unrest or even criticism. Not even holding a foreign passport or being part of the political or economic elite will protect anyone who is perceived as a threat or even a nuisance to the regime. Egyptians living outside the country, whether in the diaspora or exile, are regularly seeing their relatives harassed, threatened, and even kidnapped in an effort to force them into silence, and some are even returning to face “justice,” turning the Egyptian diaspora into an exilic community.
Making the situation worse is that Egypt’s allies in Europe and North America have maintained full-throttle support for the Sisi regime that renders most criticism from civil society all but irrelevant in practice. The United States continues to provide more than a billion dollars a year in military and economic aid, and the British and Italian governments didn’t hesitate to strengthen bilateral ties with Egypt, including arms sales and security cooperation, even after Italian Cambridge University graduate student Giulio Regeni was tortured to death in police custody in January, 2016. Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron awarded Sisi the Légion d’honneur in 2020 despite the murder of a French citizen, Eric Lang, in an Egyptian police station in 2013 and the long and harsh imprisonment of French-Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Shaath. This system in which torture is so rampant that even the torturers complain of growing bored with the regimen still can’t find a way to curtail, never mind stop, the violence.
If weapons purchases and oil and gas concessions help grease the wheels of continued international support, there is little doubt that monetizing prisons—and prisoners—won’t be far behind for Egypt’s military and allied elite. A 2014 report by the Century Foundation explains, “With Egypt’s military and security forces controlling so much of the economy, it is likely this prison build-up is partially based on financial incentives. Prisons, especially private ones, can be sites for lucrative business.”
As we explained earlier, there is a long history of using prisoners as corvée labor in Egypt. That has not been an important element during Sisi’s reign (although soldiers have increasingly been called into factories to replace striking workers), for a telling reason: however exploitative, work would in fact be preferable to being stuck in a tiny, horribly overcrowded and filthy cell almost twenty-four hours a day. And that’s why the government has no interest in having prisoners work—at least for now—since the goal of political imprisonment under Sisi is to break people completely, not rehabilitate them or profit off their labor.
The experience of political imprisonment in Egypt during the last decade demonstrates just how pervasive carceral systems are to modern political systems.
This could change with the construction of new “American-style” prisons; there are videos that depict prisoners at work in various types of factory labor. Indeed, as Sanaa Seif explained in a 2022 public forum celebrating the publication of her brother Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s collection of prison writings, “They showed us the infamous video for the giant new prison complex in Wadi Natrun and are basically using it as a carrot, telling us that the best-behaved prisoners will get transferred to the new prison with its larger and cleaner cells and so on.”
Indeed, the new American-style prisons point to the long-term danger of a carceral state when it comes to protecting the most basic rights of citizens. According to relatives of one prominent detainee, “From the standpoint of the family, the new prisons are better—there is parking, shade for those waiting outside, even an information booth where an officer will inform family members of the exact location where a loved one is being held in a large prison complex. But for prisoners, despite the improvement in cleanliness and overcrowding, there are many ways in which the situation is significantly worse.” Among the two most important are that prisoners are under continuous twenty-four-hour surveillance, and that smaller units with fewer people, while easing overcrowding, means that there’s no real sense of community.
Finally, in the newer prisons the ability to be physically next to loved ones has been greatly diminished if not eliminated. In Wadi Natrun, for example, visitations for political prisoners take place almost entirely with glass separations, to prevent any physical contact or even private communication. This was not the case under Mubarak. As Gameela Ismail explained, “Even with a high-profile prisoner like Ayman [Nour], [for] whom they wanted to force family visitations to occur in the officials’ offices to better monitor them, we could whisper in each other’s ears and he could pass me letters or notes surreptitiously until almost the end of his sentence.” All of these strategies to at least bend the system are rendered inoperative by the contemporary prison architecture, rules, and logic. Onetime student and long-term political prisoner Ayman Moussa expressed it best in a letter describing the all-enveloping nature of imprisonment in Egypt today: “I exhale darkness . . . I inhale darkness . . . then I look at my watch . . . it is 3:08 a.m.”
For Reasons of State
The experience of political imprisonment in Egypt during the last decade, as in too many other Arab countries and societies across the Middle East—but also in Africa, China, Brazil, Russia, India, and indeed in their racialized counterparts in the United States, Australia, and other countries with large numbers of incarcerated minorities, Indigenous communities, and/or migrants—demonstrates just how pervasive carceral systems are to modern political systems, “liberal democratic” as well as authoritarian. Whether these systems are used as a tool to quarantine and even profit from citizens deemed disposable or undisciplinable owing to racialized neoliberal policies, or to silence opponents to dictatorial regimes, confining, marking, and even destroying the bodies of millions of people have become core survival practices of states across the world. This surely accounts for one reason why Western governments are not just unmoved by the large-scale and systemic human rights violations in these countries but are complicit with them.
When it comes to Egypt in particular, which has been the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid and with close economic, security, and strategic relations with most of the major European powers despite harassing, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering their citizens as well as its own, there is little doubt that Western countries remain complicit in the ongoing regime of political and penal terror, or that their citizens have the right and indeed obligation to press for their governments to end their support for this and every other regime that steals the lives of so many of its children. In the end, as with climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and other global disasters, the impact of mass political imprisonment, torture, and repression cannot be cordoned off; these practices eventually infect every country and constitute a violation of everyone’s rights as much as of those of their most direct victims.
In Turi, the small village in southern Italy where Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned from 1928 until 1933, the prison where he was detained still stands. On the facade of the main building, at the top, to the left of the large entrance door, is a plaque that reads, “In this jail Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned. Teacher, liberator, martyr, who announced to his foolish executioners their ruin, to a dying nation its salvation, to the working class victory.” Our deepest wish is, sometime soon, to read a similar sentence on the gates of Tora, Qanater, and all the other Egyptian prisons where today the bravest among the Egyptian people are paying the highest price for having dared to dream of a better world.
Adapted from Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated, edited by Collective Antigone, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2025.