Thinking with Alaa: Nothing but love 

“Death is still sober and chooses the best of us.” In a brief post addressed to Asmaa al-Beltagui, who was killed during the violent dispersal of the Rabea al-Adaweya sit-in in August 2013, Alaa writes that he is sorry, and yet, that his only coping with the madness of life is the sobriety of death.

I brush aside the terrifying fear of his own death, on his 200^th day of hunger strike, while I also fathom about the decisiveness of death; in its finality, ultimate and inner meanings are bound to unleash, a meaning that is here not to be comprehended or wrestled with, but more to inhabit us, like a specter, a ghost.

While Alaa is cognizant of the authority of death, long before it became a looming fate for him, he doesn’t fall into the compelling ease of its poetics. “Do not be turned from the righteous path by the many corpses strewn upon it,” he writes in November 2013, pointing to the polarization that prevailed following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from power and the violence that ensued.

I am drawn to something from the order of metaphysics in grappling with Alaa’s current absence and possible disappearance not because that’s all we have. We have a lot of material grappling with how we can resist the complex web of injustice we are entangled in.

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a compilation of Alaa’s writings from the last 10 years, is a condensation of this grappling through his everyday thought, one of his main modalities of resistance as a free man (as well as a man in jail, but thinking in custody, despite our romanticizing of the freedom of spirit, also becomes captive). In one such thought, for example, he asks back in 2013 about the bourgeoisie made of “small-scale capitalists, and medium-sized productions and trading firms” with no connections or enough wealth to make them actors in conflicts of power. He wonders how these are absent from local leftist politics, which are naturally and habitually drawn to the more radical question of the working classes. But in a country where the “market heavyweights all seem to be connected to the gang economy or the globalized market more than they are connected to the market for local resources and labor,” can we imagine a more tactical (and localized) inclusion of the bourgeoisie by a radical left ready to think past the determined failure of bourgeois revolutions?

While his insight is rooted in the lived details of political making at home, in Egypt, he often leaps with this insight out to the global. In his article series on Uber, penned in Tora Prison in 2016, he reminds us that the notion of the inevitability of progress (in this case, disruptive technologies) is but an ideological tool and that politics shape how this inevitability manifests (technology might be inevitable but not how it spreads and how it enriches and impoverishes). More introspectively, he reminds us how politics lie in the way the labor market itself is re-shaped through this technological revolution, which, unlike the industrial revolution, is not creating the dynamics propelled by changes in the production process itself or the commodities produced.

And as we head to the Egypt-hosted UN climate change summit in November, an occasion to strike — not without difficulty — the connections between climate justice and human justice, Alaa helps us navigate even a tiny bit of the puzzle. In an argument that could possibly be situated within the unsettling of nature-society dualism, Alaa follows how the political ramifications of climate change are manifesting mostly in the polarization that made folks from coal-producing areas vote for Donald Trump and folks fearing the environmental tax vote for the UK to exit the European Union. As such, the climate crisis is predated by economic, social and political crises that are themselves also predicated on environmental questions. Thinking about the environment from the vantage point of this intricate temporality may leave us in the more believable yet complex web of things. From here, we generate thought.

These are all outward looking, engaged reflections on what habit breaking leftist organizing can do and how ideology uses nature to claim hegemonic economic models as inevitable.

But then we have all the grappling with his own incarceration and the models of oppression it indexes. Here, we aren’t facing the self-indulgence of an inmate. Rather, we are faced with the facticity of incarceration mediated by the wealth of Alaa’s near-decade experience as an inmate. Throughout his writings, he oscillates between the appearances and the essences of the practice of justice in Egypt. At times, he describes performances of justice as primordial grantors of its meaning undertaken by the state. At others, he lays out the architecture of justice when the police apparatus accumulates so much power within it. He goes further to depict the product of such justice, in the experience of imprisonment, using the framing of the revenge of the victorious. In this text, written in 2019, we read a graphic account of incarceration, powered by the authority of bare facts, where he arrives at the conclusion that “the total negation of the voice and body is the impetus of the enmity.”

And yet, he continues to generate from this place, including through the paradoxical move of addressing this power justice, bringing his own logic to it. In one of his repeated correspondences to the prosecutor, he writes to complain about his deprivation of books and magazines. He frames his plea in the Egyptian state’s growing phobia of the written word, and twists that to juxtapose it with Egypt’s 19th-century embrace of modernity and the articulation of ideas that came with it. That this is used in a letter to the prosecutor by a prisoner carries a lesson he learned from his father, prominent human rights defender Ahmed Seif al-Islam, whom he lost while in jail in 2014. It is a lesson from the order of “respecting this invention called the law, called justice, without romanticizing it.”^[1] In this gesture of respect, embodied in formal letter writing, and the intelligent argument that appeals to the cornerstones of this very prosecutor’s position, modernity dissolves. It dissolves in the very act of writing a letter by an inmate that will never be responded to.

Alaa knows it and does it for other reasons. From Tora Prison in 2017, he writes “I am in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us. So let us be an example but of our own choosing. Let us be an example, not a warning.” And then he tinkers with abolition, not as an abstract reflection but as an ultimate answer to what he has seen for himself for years in prison.

We have much more from Alaa than his absent condition and possible disappearance to grapple with: acts of his as a free man, acts of his in incarceration, writings through time, writings collected together that act like a rhythmic record of the last ten years, with each of its eras having its own beat of ability to theorize, ability to imagine action and falling into total despair. In his epic text, written with fellow prisoner Ahmad Douma^[2] in 2014, Alaa asks us to actively “kill our myth with our own hands.”

And yet I am drawn to something from the order of metaphysics, of Alaa’s own doing. When he calls himself “the ghost of spring past” and asks us to “haunt the dreams of [our] comrades, and the nightmares of [our] enemies… [to] be a specter, a memory and a herald”, he is pointing us in the direction of what remains politically possible in absence, in disappearance, and through hauntology. With a tap on the shoulder, he awakens us to the fact that “pain is the price to be paid for redemption.” He elevates himself to being “the poison,” “the remedy,” “the medicine” and “the cause.”

And yet, “there is no dignity for a body that is deprived of the embrace of its loved ones,” he writes from Tora Liman Prison in August 2014, days before his father died in hospital.

“the revolutionary,
when he rises,
cares for nothing
but love.”^[3]

[1] Read Nader Andrawos’ astute dissection of Alaa and his family’s inversion of the law, here
[2] Douma is a political activist who has been detained since 2013 and faces a 15-year sentence for “unlawful assembly” and allegedly assaulting police forces
[3] By Douma