Status Audio Magazine

Alaa Abd El Fattah is a writer, programmer, community organizer and activist who constantly generates new meaning to the notion of activism. 

He has been in political detention during the Hosni Mubarak era, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces interim rule following the January 25 revolution, the military-appointed government in July 3, 2013 and the ensuing rule of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. He was threatened with arrest during the short-lived rule of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. 

Abd El Fattah’s last imprisonment in November was on charges related to the protest law. After being released in March, he was re-arrested in June after being handed a 15-year prison sentence in absentia even though he was present outside the court the day of the hearing. In September, he was released pending the case, following the judge’s retreat from the hearings. 

In those last four months in prison, Abd El Fattah saw his sister arrested, his father die, and an escalating hunger strike campaign among political detainees in which he took part. Even though his last detention was the continuation of a struggle, it was also different in some ways. In this conversation with Lina Attalah, he speaks of resistance in the midst of despair, of taking the fight to the very basic site of life, the body.  From his work with children on using Facebook to ridicule their teachers in the Arab Digital Expression Camps, to his work with pro-democracy activists on using blogs to mobilize thousands of Egyptians against their government in the Kefaya movement, Alaa just loves helping people use ICTs to stick it to the man.

By day he works as a free and open source software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo, jumping from campaign to campaign, building websites, providing support and training, looking out for activities in  need. He likes to pretend that his work on the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation of digital activists, while the rest of the world acts as if his blog is relevant. In 2004, he founded the GNU/Linux users group, a collective for open source software techies and activists. In 2008, together with his wife and long time partner, Manal, he founded Arab Techies, a collective of developers, programmers, designers, bloggers and journalists from across the Arab region, who use ICTs actively for social and political change. After moving to South Africa in 2008 to take on a job in software localization, he came back to Egypt in 2011, right in the midst of the occupation of Tahrir Square, and ever since then, has been entangled with Egypt's unfinished revolution. 

At the end of 2011, Alaa was detained on charges of vandalism and assaulting soldiers as he took part in a mostly Christian protest demanding minority rights in Downtown Cairo. This won't be Alaa's first prison experience, as he was detained during the Hosni Mubarak era in 2006, when he took part in protests supporting the independence of the judiciary. Alaa is currently in detention, facing charges of "unauthorized protests" alongside another 24 defendants and has been in an out of prison on this case since November 2013.