This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*
Jillian York: Welcome, let’s start here. What does free speech or free expression mean to you personally?
Lina Attalah: Being able to think without too many calculations and without fear.
York: What are the qualities that make you passionate about the work that you do, and also about telling stories and utilizing your free expression in that way?
Well, it ties in with your first question. Free speech is basically being able to express oneself without fear and without too many calculations. These are things that are not granted, especially in the context I work in. I know that it does not exist in any absolute way anywhere, and increasingly so now, but even more so in our context, and historically it hasn’t existed in our context. So this has also drawn me to try to unearth what is not being said, what is not being known, what is not being shared. I guess the passion came from that lack more than anything else. Perhaps, if I lived in a democracy, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to be a journalist.
York: I’d like to ask you about Syria, since you just traveled there. I know that you’re familiar with the context there in terms of censorship and the Internet in particular. What do you see in terms of people’s hopes for more expression in Syria in the future?
I think even though we share an environment where freedom of expression has been historically stifled, there is an exception to Syria when it comes to the kind of controls there have been on people’s ability to express, let alone to organize and mobilize. I think there’s also a state of exception when it comes to the price that had to be paid in Syrian prisons for acts of free expression and free speech. This is extremely exceptional to the fabric of Syrian society. So going there and seeing that this condition was gone, after so much struggle, after so much loss, is a situation that is extremely palpable. From the few days I spent there, what was clear to me is that everybody is pretty much uncertain about the future, but there is an undoubted relief that this condition is gone for now, this fear. It literally felt like it’s a lower sky, sort of repressing people’s chests somehow, and it’s just gone. This burden was just gone. It’s not all flowery, it’s not all rosy. Everybody is uncertain. But the very fact that this fear is gone is very palpable and cannot be taken away from the experience we’re living through now in Syria.
York: I love that. Thank you. Okay, let’s go to Egypt a little bit. What can you tell us about the situation for free speech in the context of Egypt? We’re coming up on fourteen years since the uprising in 2011 and eleven years since Sisi came to power. And I mean, I guess, contextualize that for our readers who don’t know what’s happened in Egypt in the past decade or so.
For a quick summary, the genealogy goes as follows. There was a very tight margin through which we managed to operate as journalists, as activists, as people trying to sort of enlarge the space through which we can express ourselves on matters of public concerns in the last years of Mubarak’s rule. And this is the time that coincided with the opening up of the internet—back in the time when the internet was also more of a public space, before the overt privatization that we experience in that virtual space as well. Then the Egyptian revolution happened in 2011 and that space further exploded in expression and diversity of voices and people speaking to different issues that had previously been reserved to the hideouts of activist circles.
Then you had a complete reversal of all of this with the takeover of a military appointed government. Subsequently, with the election of President Sisi in 2014, it became clear that it was a government that believed that the media’s role—this is just one example focusing on the media—is to basically support the government in a very sort of 1960s nasserite understanding that there is a national project, that he’s leading it, and we are his soldiers. We should basically endorse, support, not criticize, not weaken, basically not say anything differently from him. And you know this, of course, transcends the media. Everybody should be a soldier in a way and also the price of doing otherwise has been hefty, in the sense that a lot of people ended up under prosecution, serving prolonged jail sentences, or even spending prolonged times in pre-trial detention without even getting prosecuted.
So you have this total reversal from an unfolding moment of free speech that sort of exploded for a couple of years starting in 2011, and then everything closing up, closing up, closing up to the point where that margin that I started off talking about at the beginning is almost no longer even there. And, on a personal note, I always ask myself if the margin has really tightened or if one just becomes more scared as they grow older? But the margin has indeed tightened quite extensively. Personally, I’m aging and getting more scared. But another objective indicator is that almost all of my friends and comrades who have been with me on this path are no longer around because they are either in prison or in exile or have just opted out from the whole political apparatus. So that says that there isn’t the kind of margin through which we managed to maneuver before the revolution.
York: Earlier you touched on the privatization of online spaces. Having watched the way tech companies have behaved over the past decade, what do you think that these companies fail to understand about the Egyptian and the regional context?
It goes back to how we understand this ecosystem, politically, from the onset. I am someone who thinks of governments and markets, or governments and corporations, as the main actors in a market, as dialectically interchangeable. Let’s say they are here to control, they are here to make gains, and we are here to contest them even though we need them. We need the state, we need the companies. But there is no reason on earth to believe that either of them want our best. I’m putting governments and companies in the same bucket, because I think it’s important not to fall for the liberals’ way of thinking that the state has certain politics, but the companies are freer or are just after gains. I do think of them as formidable political edifices that are self-serving. For us, the political game is always how to preserve the space that we’ve created for ourselves, using some of the leverage from these edifices without being pushed over and over.
For me, this is a very broad political thing, and I think about them as a duality, because, operating as a media organization in a country like Egypt, I have to deal with the dual repression of those two edifices. To give you a very concrete example, in 2017 the Egyptian government blocked my website, Mada Masr, alongside a few other media websites, shortly before going on and blocking hundreds of websites. All independent media websites, without exception, have been blocked in Egypt alongside sites through which you can download VPN services in order to be able to also access these blocked websites. And that’s done by the government, right? So one of the things we started doing when this happened in 2017 is we started saying, “Okay, we should invest in Meta. Or back then it was still Facebook, so we should invest in Facebook more. Because the government monitors you.” And this goes back to the relation, the interchangeability of states and companies. The government would block Mada Masr, but would never block Facebook, because it’s bad for business. They care about keeping Facebook up and running.
It’s not Syria back in the time of Assad. It’s not Tunisia back in the time of Ben Ali. They still want some degree of openness, so they would keep social media open. So we let go of our poetic triumphalism when we said, we will try to invest in more personalized, communitarian dissemination mechanisms when building our audiences, and we’ll just go on Facebook. Because what option do we have? But then what happens is that is another track of censorship in a different way that still blocks my content from being able to reach its audiences through all the algorithmic developments that happened and basically the fact that—and this is not specific to Egypt—they just want to think of themselves as the publishers. They started off by treating us as the publishers and themselves as the platforms, but at this point, they want to be everything. And what would we expect from a big company, a profitable company, besides them wanting to be everything?
York: I don’t disagree at this point. I think that there was a point in time where I would have disagreed. When you work closely with companies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that change is possible because you know good people who work there, people who really are trying their best. But those people are rarely capable of shifting the direction of the company, and are often the ones to leave first.
Let’s shift to talking about our friend, Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah. You mentioned the impact that the past 11 years, really the past 14 years, have had on people in Egypt. And, of course, there are many political prisoners, but one of the prisoners that that EFF readers will be familiar with is Alaa. You recently accepted the English PEN Award on his behalf. Can you tell us more about what he has meant to you?
One way to start talking about Alaa is that I really hope that 2025 is the year when he will get released. It’s just ridiculous to keep making that one single demand over and over without seeing any change there. So Alaa has been imprisoned on account of his free speech, his attempt to speak freely. And he attempted to speak, you know, extremely freely in the sense that a lot of his expression is his witty sort of engagement with surrounding political events that came through his personal accounts on social media, in additional to the writing that he’s been doing for different media platforms, including ours and yours and so on. And in that sense, he’s so unmediated, he’s just free. A truly free spot. He has become the icon of the Egyptian revolution, the symbol of revolutionary spirit who you know is fighting for people’s right to free speech and, more broadly, their dignity. I guess I’m trying to make a comment, a very basic comment, on abolition and, basically, the lack of utility of prisons, and specifically political prisons. Because the idea is to mute that voice. But what has happened throughout all these years of Alaa’s incarceration is that his voice has only gotten amplified by this very lack, by this very absence, right? I always lament about the fact that I do not know if I would have otherwise become very close to Alaa. Perhaps if he was free and up and running, we wouldn’t have gotten this close. I have no idea. Maybe he would have just gone working on his tech projects and me on my journalism projects. Maybe we would have tried to intersect, and we had tried to intersect, but maybe we would have gone on without interacting much. But then his imprisonment created this tethering where I learned so much through his absence.
Somehow I’ve become much more who I am in terms of the journalism, in terms of the thinking, in terms of the politics, through his absence, through that lack. So there is something that gets created with this aggressive muting of a voice that should be taken note of. That being said, I don’t mean to romanticize absence, because he needs to be free. You know it’s, it’s becoming ridiculous at this point. His incarceration is becoming ridiculous at this point.
York: I guess I also have to ask, what would your message be to the UK Government at this point?
Again, it’s a test case for what so-called democratic governments can still do to their citizens. There needs to be something more forceful when it comes to demanding Alaa’s release, especially in view of the condition of his mother, who has been on a hunger strike for over 105 days as of the day of this interview. So I can’t accept that this cannot be a forceful demand, or this has to go through other considerations pertaining to more abstract bilateral relations and whatnot. You know, just free the man. He’s your citizen. You know, this is what’s left of what it means to be a democratic government.
York: Who is your free speech hero?
It’s Alaa. He always warns us of over-symbolizing him or the others. Because he always says, when we over symbolize heroes, they become abstract. And we stop being able to concretize the fights and the resistance. We stop being able to see that this is a universal battle where there are so many others fighting it, albeit a lot more invisible, but at the same time. Alaa, in his person and in what he represents, reminds me of so much courage. A lot of times I am ashamed of my fear. I’m ashamed of not wanting to pay the price, and I still don’t want to pay the price. I don’t want to be in prison. But at the same time, I look up at someone like Alaa, fearlessly saying what he wants to say, and I’m just always in awe of him.
This post was originally published on here
