What It’s Like To … Dedicate Your Life to Activism and Fight Egypt’s Revolution in Exile

“The road to liberate Palestine passes through Cairo,” el-Hamalawy told the audience, tracing Egypt’s political history with Palestine through his own activist journey from the 1990s until today.

Everyone was inspired by his passion, sincerity, and expertise. After the talk, several people asked how they could get involved. Even though he’d just spent over an hour speaking, el-Hamalawy made time to answer everybody’s follow-up questions, passing out much-needed assurance that there’s always something that can be done, even in the face of military dictatorships and genocide.

Hossam el-Hamalawy: I can trace my interest in politics to my early childhood. My father, Rashad el-Hamalawy, was born into a working-class family in Tanta. There was no sanitation or electricity at his house, and he had to study under street lamps. Despite that, he was granted a scholarship at Cairo University and ascended with skyrocketing speed within the organization of Socialist Youth.

It’s funny, I’m supposed to talk about myself, and now I’m talking about my father. But without him, I don’t think that my life trajectory would have been in the field that I’m in today. He was a left-wing academic, and I grew up in a highly political environment.

I was born in 1977, a few months after the bread uprising, when Anwar Sadat started cracking down on the left. My family was part of an exodus to Yemen, then Kuwait, but he couldn’t put up with the racism there. We returned to Egypt in 1981, a few months before Sadat’s assassination, which I actually attended.

I was politicized by tiny things that bothered me about life in Egypt. I traveled to Athens in sixth grade and was shocked that we couldn’t find garbage in the streets. In Tanta, I was horrified by the level of poverty: piles of garbage everywhere, children running around barefoot. My father always said that we deserve better than this.

In 1991, Egypt led its first ‘dirty war:’ people were disappearing, torture became endemic and systemic, extrajudicial killings, and mass arrests under the pretext of fighting terrorism. These were my teenage years. Growing up in Cairo in the 1990s was almost like growing up under occupation. Checkpoints everywhere, you get stopped and arrested randomly by the police.

In 1995, I joined the American University in Cairo (AUC). It was a cultural shock to be around such wealthy elites. I got involved with an Arab nationalist group, but it was the worst time to be an Arab nationalist: the defeat of the first Intifada, the Gulf War, Pax Americana... But I disliked the Islamists, and Hosni Mubarak was very uninspiring. I wanted to know ‘what’s to be done?’

Disillusioned with Arab nationalism, I was reading about Marxism and Existentialism, just searching for answers. I joined the Revolutionary Socialists, which was a clandestine organization. Our generation rebuilt the left on the campuses.

The challenges we face in Egypt differ from one period to another. In the 1990s, the left was on the retreat, and we were isolated and repressed. Whenever we tried to organize, we faced ridicule.

You could not whisper the name Mubarak. I tried it once, and everyone started running for their lives; I gained notoriety because I was trying to push us to talk about Mubarak, and that scared other activists — until the second Intifada in 2000. Suddenly, there were explosions of protests, from the campuses to the professional syndicates and even kindergarten schools. These protests gave us a chance to provide leadership.

On October 8, 2000, I was kidnapped by state security police for the first time. It was one hell of a horrible experience. I spent four days blindfolded, stripped naked, beaten up, and tortured. But I didn’t confess. I was arrested a few times later in crackdowns, but this was the worst experience. The person who supervised my torture was Major General Hesham Abu Haide, who was running the Cairo Governorate for the state security police.

In April 2002, Ariel Sharon sent tanks into the West Bank and triggered the Cairo University Intifada. For two days, there were running battles around the university with the police, and this was the first time in my life that I heard thousands chanting against Mubarak.

I wanted to go into academia, but I was blacklisted and couldn’t get security clearance. By sheer coincidence, I landed a job at The Cairo Times and started my journalist career.

I was mesmerized by the impact of Al Jazeera on the 2000 protests. Why did Egyptians suddenly get the courage? I concluded that the dissemination of visuals of the Palestinian Intifada to every Egyptian home was a radicalizing factor.

I later dubbed this the ‘Visualization of Dissent’ strategy. When we organized protests as part of the Kefaya movement, we would contact Al Jazeera in advance. We wanted to normalize protests.

In 2006, a strike wave started, and in every factory I visited as a reporter and organizer, they told me that they’d seen or heard of others going on strike, so they decided to do it, too. When Khaled Said was killed in police custody in 2010, after one decade of struggles and strike action, the country was fertile for the revolution.

I left Egypt in October 2015, two years after Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s coup. First, I thought there was still space to mobilize and confront it. In 2014, there had been a renewed wave of strike action, which lifted my hopes. But these were the last dying breaths.

After El-Sisi was elected, I told my comrades it’s game over. I collapsed; I was completely burned out. The bitter thing about defeat is that it doesn’t just come as one blow; it comes gradually. I spent a year battling depression, waiting for my turn. Every night, I’d wait for the door to get smashed.

I got a job at AJ+ in Doha and left Egypt via the Maldives, because you couldn’t go to Qatar without security clearance. I left pretending I was going on a tourist diving trip. Meanwhile, the state security police came for my family, notifying them that I’m wanted.

I wanted to go to Europe, but they didn’t need journalists and photographers. A PhD programme was the only way, so I drafted a proposal about Egypt’s dirty war and got accepted at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

I’ve been living in Germany since 2017. Everything there was alien to me, and I wasn’t in my best shape psychologically, but I gradually got back to the mindset: ‘what’s to be done?’

You don’t stay in a depression forever. After a period of licking your wounds, you start getting your act together again. I fought to get on my feet again and got involved in rebuilding the organization abroad and helping my comrades back home logistically.

I finished my PhD in 2023 about how El-Sisi restructured the security apparatus after the coup, and I’ve been producing knowledge about Egypt both in English and in Arabic.

There’s a new generation of Egyptians who are too young to remember 2011, and they’re seeking answers to ‘what’s to be done?’ That’s the audience I’m trying to reach, at home and abroad. To prepare for the next revolution.

My role until I return is to create the widest network of Egyptian activists abroad, to organize us, and highlight how the governments of the countries we’re staying at are propping up the regime in Cairo.

It’s not easy for me. I’m like a fish that’s been taken out of its water. I spent most of my life on the same block in Nasr City. I miss my bed and my flat, which will be gone with the new rent law. I miss my friends and the streets.

I miss a Cairo that doesn’t exist any longer. Everything has changed. No one from my network of support lives there anymore.

In Germany, I’m a foreigner and I’ll never be fluent enough to have a political conversation. My German isn’t even good enough to fight with the Vodafone customer service. If the regime falls in Egypt, I’ll be on the first flight.

But I’m also scared of that moment. I’m scared of arriving in an Egypt that I wouldn’t recognize. It’s purgatory, I’m somewhere between heaven and hell. In a way, that’s my motivation to be more active so that when I go back to Egypt, I’ll go back to build the Egypt I dreamt of.

It’ll be neither the Egypt I’m nostalgic for, nor the ugly one now. It’ll be the one that my father was fighting for when he said ‘we deserve better.’”