On the morning of September 22, 2025, everyone was surprised by the news of a presidential pardon for Alaa Abd El-Fattah. By that evening, overwhelming joy spread as photos of his return to the arms of his mother and sisters circulated after five years in prison. The suffering was compounded by the devastating news that followed: the years he spent in pretrial detention would not be counted. This meant Alaa was to spend two additional years in prison, and indeed, he had already served nearly eight months of that sentence before the presidential pardon was issued.
For those unfamiliar with the story of Alaa and his mother, it can be summarized as years of hunger strikes, appeals, negotiations, protests, pardon requests, and desperate attempts to secure his release. It even reached a point of personal intervention from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who personally asked President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to look into Alaa’s case. But even such diplomatic negotiations did nothing to change the reality. Nothing changed until the president exercised his constitutional right to pardon him, when he himself willed it.
In every case concerning women, justice cries out, trying to be heard,
...but all eyes turn only to falsehood and injustice.
Opinions vary on the legitimacy of Alaa’s imprisonment in the first place, but he was jailed by decree. And Alaa’s release, after eight months of unjust imprisonment, only came by decree. This is the state of affairs, not only in our country but in every nation saturated with oppression, degradation of dignity, and the treatment of its people like a herd that is dragged, fed, watered, and put to sleep by decree.
“This nation can only be governed by military rule; otherwise, things fall apart.” It’s a sentence you have almost certainly heard at least once in your life. But I recently realized that this is not limited to Egypt alone; a while ago, a friend from Sudan told me that this same phrase is repeated there as well. Such is the case in every country whose people have been raised with a taste of the military boot, to the point where we have begun to relish it and surrender to the impossibility of doing without it. However, what many overlook is that whoever has lived under oppression will practice oppression themselves at the first opportunity they get.
The one who imprisoned and released Alaa by decree, without any regard or respect for the rule of law or constitutional texts, is not so different from the police officer who extorts and oppresses you without cause, nor from the bureaucrat who takes pleasure in delaying your paperwork without even expecting a bribe—doing it solely for personal amusement or out of a conviction that you don’t deserve to have it done quickly. They are all like the tyrannical teacher who exercises violence, not education, upon his students, knowing that no law will deter him and no authority will hold him accountable; he alone is the decider and the enforcer.
The one who imprisoned and released Alaa by decree, without any regard for the rule of law, is not so different from the police officer who oppresses you without cause.
Oppression has a unique narrative when it comes to women, yet paying attention to it is difficult because the oppression of women aligns with the majority’s mentality. So we don’t complain about it, nor do we simply get used to it in silence; instead, we justify and defend it. We defend a man who murdered a woman for doing nothing more than rejecting him, and we defend a husband who killed his wife on mere suspicion of her behavior, without any proof—and even if there were proof, we would defend him anyway. In every case concerning women, justice cries out, trying to be heard, but all eyes turn only to falsehood and injustice.
And oppression spares no one. If you consider creating content that includes language society deems “offensive,” even if not directed at anyone in particular, you might find yourself accused of defamation and threatened with imprisonment by an arbitrary order. We have a living example in the Egyptian content creator Mohamed Abdel-Aty, who, at the time of this writing, remains detained without a clear conviction; an order was simply issued for his detention, and that was sufficient.
An oppressor is not satisfied with merely practicing his oppression; he views its removal as a magnanimous act of pardon.
In every street of our beloved nation, oppression is practiced in all its forms. If we were to trace its origins, we would find lawlessness, the absence of the rule of law applied with justice and resolve, and we would find moral decay and the tendency of some human souls toward deviance. But if we want to get to the roots, we must admit that the oppression practiced today is but an echo of the oppression this nation was born into from its very inception.
If only it ended there. In one of his works, Bertolt Brecht, speaking through a Nazi character, mentioned that you can make a cat greedily eat a spoonful of mustard after shoving it up its rear. Likewise, after this chain of oppression, you are expected to offer thanks and praise for the abundance of grace shown in pardoning you after your humiliation. Thus, the oppressor is not satisfied with merely practicing his oppression; he views its removal as a magnanimous act of pardon.
