Anonymous/AP Photo
A demonstrator defaces a poster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Alexandria, Egypt, January 25, 2011.
I lived my first 25 years under one president: the one and only Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian president’s portrait hung in schools, in the street, and at police stations. Every year on his birthday, we sang songs about him, and TV shows praised his greatness, his genius. But he was more than just a portrait; his dark hand gripped the whole nation of Egypt. He kept us down and besieged the lives of 90 million people.
I haven’t forgotten any of this. It’s not a historical event, but a reality that we still endure. My friends are still in jail; others are in exile, scattered all over the planet. Most of them, like me, don’t have a long-term residence. And those who have the right visas are still caught between two worlds. They are slogging in circles, carrying their homes in their backpacks.
Ten years after Mubarak’s fall in the 2011 revolution, I don’t have any nostalgia for the freedom and euphoria of protests in the public square. Yes, for 18 days as the protests captured the world’s attention, the stars were in our grip.
Like Black Lives Matter, our revolution started as demonstrations against police brutality.
Then, under the military dictatorship of Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, I was jailed for a novel I wrote. Then I fled to the United States and endured the Trump presidency. Every day, I see all of us, in Egypt or America, facing the same struggles. How can we imagine a new world and create a global strategy that restores faith in values like freedom, justice, and equality? These were the calls of the Egyptian revolution, and I could hear them echo this past summer as I walked through the Black Lives Matter protests in Las Vegas, where my family and I live in exile.
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, everything in Egypt needed permission. Not just political activity or organizing, but even investing money, starting a mosque or church, or just speaking your mind on the street. There was no personal freedom. And once Mubarak got bored of being a dictator for 30 years, he planned to hand off the country to his son, as just another family heirloom.
George W. Bush’s administration put pressure on Mubarak, starting in 2005, to allow a margin of political freedom. Soon, there were new independent media outlets. His government put on the theatrics of a presidential election, not free or fair, but an election nonetheless. It was a bread crumb for the people. But it was hardly political reform.
Mubarak wasted lives and imprisoned Egyptians for years without trial or even charges. After the 2005 reforms, opposing Mubarak could lead to imprisonment or torture. You might be beaten, dragged through the street, or harassed. Those sacrifices, however, opened the door to other opposition groups to gain more access to the public through the internet and new technologies. That in turn gave Egyptians tools to organize themselves in new forms, leading to January 25, 2011.
Like Black Lives Matter, our revolution started as demonstrations against police brutality. Egyptian police had tortured and killed a young online organizer in Alexandria, Khaled Said, and to honor his life, we took to the streets. For 18 days, people protested in downtown Cairo, in the country’s most iconic square.
Khalil Hamra/AP Photo
The crowd in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, February 1, 2011
After the fall of Mubarak on February 11, Egypt became an open arena for regional and international powers. They rushed to invest billions in the Egyptian economy and media to gain influence in shaping Egypt’s political future.
Two main camps would battle for power to define Egypt’s future. First, there were Islamist groups led by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and supported by regional powers Turkey and Qatar. This group saw the all-powerful Egyptian military as a distinctly undemocratic regime. From their perspective, the Egyptian security state’s violations of human rights—which many from this camp experienced in Mubarak’s prisons—actually create unstable realities in the long term, a fertile environment for terrorist recruitment and radicalization. The Obama administration joined this camp.
On the other front stood the army’s generals alongside Mubarak’s cronies, state officials, and old political figures, who believed in the military’s inevitability as ruler. They were supported by the powerful monarchs in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. Department of Defense joined this camp. This group sees the Egyptian military as a close ally that must be supported whatever they do because they are key to the region’s stability in the fight against terrorism. This was the security state that had choked Egypt for three decades under Mubarak, and it was waiting to make a comeback.
A year after the revolution, we ended up with a two-headed system. The 2012 election led to a Muslim Brotherhood president and parliament, but they didn’t have authority over the generals, who enjoy impunity and independence from all other government institutions. And it only took one year before the honeymoon ended. The army and Muslim Brotherhood went to war. Of course, the army won, and the country was back to the military’s iron hand, in a coup led by Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.
The Obama administration didn’t like Sisi from the beginning and had halted the massive annual influx of military aid. But under pressure from the Pentagon, Obama released all the military aid back to Sisi. And since then, the Egyptian military has been firmly in place as the country’s only power. When Trump met Sisi for the first time, it was love at first sight; this love flourished in the last four years, leading Trump to call Sisi “my favorite dictator.”
AFTER THE 2011 REVOLUTION, three friends and I opened a small production house for documentary films. We started in a two-room office, and after six months we had more than 25 employees and three floors of studios in the building.
Many other enterprises were born every day in a market that thirsted for economic freedom. Then, after the 2013 coup, the security state shut down everything again. At our company, we received direct and indirect threats because one of our clients was the Qatar-run TV network Al Jazeera, which has ties to the Brotherhood camp. I witnessed my journalist colleagues being targeted—being shot, kidnapped, or jailed. I departed the company and then my partners shut it down. Those who wanted to continue working in the media had to leave the country for London to work in Qatar’s media outlets.
As long as I am far from politics, I thought, I would be safe. How naïve I was.
I decided to lay low and return to my old wheelhouse, writing only about literature, music, and contemporary art. I thought that criticism—that is, not criticizing the government, but art and literary criticism—would be the safest way to live in Egypt under repressive military rule. As long as I am far from politics, I thought, I would be safe. How naïve I was.
In 2015, I published my second novel, Using Life. A couple of months later, a prosecutor summoned me to court. The prosecutor accused me of disturbing public morality because of the sex and drugs that set the backdrop to my fiction. I was sentenced to two years, and I spent a year in prison before a superior court accepted an appeal.
When I was released in December 2016, I was effectively banned from writing and publishing in Egypt. I didn’t have a source of income.
But I found love. I married Yasmin, a human rights lawyer who had bravely advocated for my freedom during my year in prison. Because of her work, she too was targeted by the regime propaganda, which accused her of defending terrorists. It was a harsh campaign. A state-backed media outlet hacked private photos and personal information from her social media accounts and aired it on TV. It was clear that we must leave, or the worst could happen.
Yasmin left for law school in New York. When I tried to join her, Egyptian police stopped me at the Cairo airport. It turned out I was banned from travel.
For a year and a half, I knocked on every door in Egypt’s hectic bureaucracy to find a way to leave the country. Finally, I was summoned to the national-security building, where a high-ranking officer interrogated me. I told him I wanted to travel to join my wife, who by then was pregnant. “We want to close this case, but if you go outside the country and act as an activist and criticize us, remember: We are everywhere,” he told me.
It was not a subtle threat. But finally, I was allowed to leave.
Steve Marcus/AP Photo
Black Lives Matter protesters rally on the Las Vegas Strip, May 31, 2020.
EXPATRIATES LIKE US don’t have the privilege of choosing which country we flee to; we just go where we can see a beam of light skipping from behind the border’s door.
I arrived in America in August 2018. A cloud of despair and frustration hung over the country. Any conversation about the future included phrases like “I am afraid.” I kept hearing the terms “white supremacist” and “civil war.” Everyone in the country had focused inward.
I came to America not only because I have friends and maybe some opportunity, but because the lawyers told me that it would be easy to get a green card. And thanks to PEN America, I am now a City of Asylum fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. It’s a program designed to help writers or artists who have been prosecuted because of their work. I learned from them the importance of solidarity through this literary brotherhood. They helped me to get an O-1 visa. I would need a whole article to thank all of the people who gave me a chance when no one else would.
With my newborn daughter, we moved to Las Vegas to find ourselves. We chased the American dream. We instantly loved the city.
I have discovered many things about myself since I arrived here. For example, I realized that I am a “brown” writer, who also could be categorized as a Muslim writer. It’s a jungle of political identities here—identities I never would have applied to myself.
We applied for green cards, but after eight months, we were denied. The lawyers were surprised given that our file made a strong case. But we were living in Trump’s America. We filed for the second time.
The smell of tear gas crept into our home, bringing back old memories.
I learned here how strange this political system is, how the white vote in Tulsa, Oklahoma, could affect my immigration status, my daughter’s future, and my jailed friends in Sisi’s prisons. It helped me realize that we didn’t lose the Egyptian revolution only because of our mistakes, but because the battle was much bigger than we could have imagined. And the battlefield wasn’t just within the Egyptian borders.
Last summer, I watched BLM protesters overcome the streets of Las Vegas. We live downtown and watched them from our window. At night, the police chased them. The smell of tear gas crept into our home, bringing back old memories.
We didn’t join the BLM protests, because we were afraid of getting arrested, which would affect our green card petitions. But our hearts and wishes were with them. By the end of the summer, we witnessed familiar scenes of the Army and National Guard taking over the streets.
But Americans are lucky. Even though the protesters didn’t get the accountability they wanted, there were other small victories. Police officers in America still act with impunity. But now America has more Black voices, in Congress and on Netflix. All the big companies issued statements about how much they love Black lives. And finally, there was a free election that led to a Black woman as vice president. Even when you lose in America, you are still able to rise up and fight again.
But how can we achieve a more consistent strategy—and more victories for human dignity and freedoms—without the death of another George Floyd or Khaled Said? I don’t have a clear answer for that, but the point is we have to believe that the world we inhabit is something we made, collectively, and therefore that we could also have made differently. That was the gift of the January 25, 2011, revolution.
