Egyptian-British political prisoner, organizer, writer, and computer programmer, Alaa Abdel Fattah has spent nine of the ten years since the counter-revolution led by General el-Sisi, in prison. He is in prison for his ideas and his words. R-Shief joins the global demand to release him.

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Alaa helped make Arabic possible on the internet. Developing Arabic-language versions of free and open source (FOSS) software and platforms, Alaa and his then spouse, Manal, first became known for developing "Omraneya." This website aggregated Egyptian blogs in the early aughts. Alaa had organized an online group of programmers working on the Arabization Drupal software, while leading training workshops in Egypt on how to install the free and open source operating system Linux.

In the period following his 2012 release, Alaa wrote very few long-form essays, instead tweeting and posting to Facebook, hosting public fora, appearing on television talk shows, and speaking at rallies amidst relentless street protests and industrial actions, parliamentary and presidential elections, constitutional crises, the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory and catastrophic year in power. His book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, uses Alaa’s social media output to tell the story of 2012–13, but we must bear in mind the sheer volume of his output: he has tweeted a total of 290,000 times since 2007–about 100 books’ worth of tweets.

Alaa uses social media not only as a medium for transmission outwards but of collecting information, combining and disseminating, as a space for debate, a personal diary, a public diary, a podium, and a comedy stage. Alaa writes relentlessly. His brain is simultaneously engaged with a multitude of topics.  

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Today, November 8, 2022, Alaa is on his 221st day of a hunger strike. Today is his third day without water. 

“He is putting his body on the line not because he wants to die but because he wants to live” @Sana2, speaking of her brother, Alaa Abdel Fattah.

#FreeAlaa, #FreeThemAll