To Laila Soueif in Her Fight to Free Alaa and Sanaa

Dear Dr. Laila Soueif,

While this is not the letter you patiently and persistently await from your son, Alaa Abdelfattah, it is our attempt as women and mothers from all over the world, to bring our voices with yours in demanding your and his most basic rights in times of Pandemic. The right to correspond, to be assured that your son is healthy and well despite his detainment.
We have been following, with great anger, what you and your daughters Sanaa and Mona experienced on the 22nd and 23rd of June, when you voiced your demand, “I want a letter”. We were shocked as the Egyptian state responded to your peaceful sit-in outside the prison with unprecedented levels of violence, tyranny and human rights violations. Ending with the heavy handed beating and detention of Sanaa under false accusations.

We recognize that they are making a show of ‘breaking’ your family, to make an example for the tens of thousands of other families who are desperate to know how their incarcerated loved ones might be faring given the threat of Covid 19. Tens of thousands who, like you and Alaa, have been denied communication for three months with the peaking of the spread of Covid-19, and the news of cases appearing in Egypt’s crammed prisons.

We feel you. Only a mother would spread her blanket and spend day and night sitting, sleeping on the street before a prison’s concrete walls, despite the heat, the dirt, the risk of violence and the risks to her health. At a time when self-isolating to maintain one’s health is the prerogative, you must risk it for a simple word from your son. There, by the prison’s walls, you are closest to him, there by the prison’s walls, you ask calmly and firmly everyday for the letter you are sure he has written. For he is as worried about you as you are about him. And now you must worry about Sanaa too.we imagine that you, like tens of thousands of other families are especially concerned about your children after the devastating fate of Shadi Habash, the young Artist who died mysteriously in the second year of his pre-trial dentition.

Laila. We see in your face, the faces of hundreds of thousands of mothers, daughter, wives of the unjustly detained in Egypt and beyond. We fear for you in light of what we’ve seen of violence, rampant violations of rights and the bigger looming threat of the Pandemic. To help keep you safe, and while we cannot be there with you – we add our voice to yours – we need to see a letter from Alaa.

We bring our voices in unison with yours, and we echo Mona’s cry upon the kidnapping of her little sister from the General Prosecutor’s door-step – “Who do we (Egyptian citizens) turn to when our rights have been violated, when our lives have been endangered? When even here, at the door of the General Prosecutor’s we can be stripped of our freedom…”

We know you will stop at nothing. As Sanaa mentioned in her hearing before detention “One can risk anything, anything but family.”