In Egypt, leaving prison does not mean escaping the security state

Submitted by Asim Qureshi on Sun, 09/27/2026 - 15:09 Abdelrahman ElGendy's memoir Huna shows how release from an Egyptian prison brings surveillance, enforced silence and the threat of renewed detention

Security forces guard Cairo's Tora prison, one of several in which Abdelrahman ElGendy was held over six years of detention, on 17 June 2019 (Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh) Off

From the very beginning of his detention, Abdelrahman ElGendy, who had just turned 17, was forced to reckon with the constant assault that is prison life in Egypt.

After being unlawfully detained in October 2013 for being close to a protest, and categorised as an alleged Muslim Brotherhood "terrorist" (read: protester), he found himself interned in Egypt's spiralling archipelago of political prisons, along with his father.

The assault that is prison life is not just in the physical act of detention, or the violence and torture enacted by captors; it is in every sound and movement made in the prison. Contrary to popular understanding, an assault in law is not an act of violence itself, but the apprehension that unlawful violence might take place - and nothing better describes life in Egypt's prisons than a constant assault.

On his first night, given no actual reason for his arrest other than the amorphous accusation of being Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), ElGendy recalls in his memoir, Huna:

"Are they going to torture us?" I blurted. I could not look at Baba.

"Well, they haven't so far. So that's a good sign." Aboulfetouh shrugged. "Maybe they'll pass us tonight."

Ten minutes later, the locks clanked outside, and I stiffened. The guard pushed open the door and signaled to me and Baba to follow him.

They came for us.

The movement of the guards outside, the sound of the keys jangling in the door, the clank of a door being opened - these are part of the ongoing violence of the prison. They are constant, everyday, audible reminders that at any point it may well be your turn, and so the body turns hypervigilant, stiffening at the prospect that the violence you have been apprehending has finally come for you. Sometimes it does.

In a hyper-militarised state, there is no escaping the assault. One would imagine that for ElGendy, the relief of release after six years of hell inside numerous prisons would provide the necessary balm for his healing. But there is no escaping the constant assault while living under the false god of what the academic Walaa Quisay and I call the deified national security state.

Political barzakh

It is tragically fitting that ElGendy refers to the period immediately after his release as barzakh - in Islam, the space that exists between this life and the eternal afterlife, but a space confined inside a grave.

Release, while welcome, becomes a barzakh of sorts for ElGendy, because he is still in Egypt, where the self-proclaimed all-seeing eye of the state continues to operate with impunity, and because the continuous assault of the prison experience carries through into the sounds and sensations of everyday life:

In prison, I had hunted for silence, cutting out sound until I lost my ears. But this noise was different...

The noise fascinated me, like a collective, conspiratorial effort to drown out the void. To forget that we were all hurtling toward death.

The noise interrupted the void; prison noise had summoned it.

The notion that release from prison in Egypt is akin to freedom is a form of gaslighting. Release places the person in a political barzakh, where everyday activity becomes yet another reminder of how tenuous the state of release might be.

The notion that release from prison in Egypt is akin to freedom is a form of gaslighting

One morning, ElGendy notices a plain white van parked by his building. Hypervigilance, coupled with a dysregulated amygdala and hippocampus, results in a state of anxiety. For ElGendy, the state is back. "They've come for me," he gasps down the phone to his Baba. Yet it wasn't the state - those he calls "the Arms" throughout the book - it was simply a gardening company parked up.

The assault is continuous precisely because of the unknowability of how the Arms operate in everyday life - just as they would walk past the cell, and it was never known whose door the keys would jangle for, and whose name would be called for interrogation.

This experience of the barzakh is not limited to the national security gaze in Egypt. In so many ways, ElGendy's post-detention experience reminds me of The Suspect by Rizwaan Sabir, who recounts being interrogated as a terrorism suspect by UK police for seven days before his eventual release.

Sabir experienced extreme paranoia after his release because of the ubiquitous presence of the national security state in his life, including in the mental health services that were there ostensibly to help people like him. It is in this ubiquity that the apprehension of unlawful state violence festers - it is seemingly everywhere.

'Mind-forg'd manacles'

I lived in Egypt in the Hosni Mubarak era while studying Arabic in Nasr City, walking constantly under the shadow of the infamous Amn al-Dawla - the State Security headquarters. It was the period in which I was least political in my life, or at least since I became aware of injustice in the world.

I recall being told by veterans of Arabic language programmes: don't talk politics to your teachers, to taxi drivers, to random people in the street. Keep yourself to yourself and never speak about the regime, about Palestine or any other matter. Stick to football.

That was in 2009, and I realise now that this is precisely what the security state requires: our best apolitical versions of ourselves, a self-erasing scrutiny that eviscerates any vestige of critique of the violence we live under. It is what William Blake termed "the mind-forg'd manacles".

As social media travellers relate their scuba-diving holidays in Hurghada, or tulab al-ilm (students of knowledge) relate their stories of studying Shafi'i jurisprudence at the prestigious Al-Azhar University, it can be difficult to remember what Egypt actually is: a country ruled by a military for the purpose of maintaining the interests of others in the region. As ElGendy read in an inscription on one prison wall:

اكتب على حيط الزنزانة، حكم العسكر عار وخيانة

Write it on the cell walls: Military rule is shame and treachery

Under such rule, it can be difficult to remember how limited one's agency is. When ElGendy's Baba rebukes him for wanting to proclaim out loud, inside prison, the betrayal that is military rule, it is hard to remember that the fault lies with the security state, not with those desperate to shout it from every rooftop.

So we find there are layers to the barzakh as it operates in every place Egyptians find themselves.

Those who are out in the open-air prison cannot speak, because to do so will invoke the state's ire against them. Those who are detained cannot speak, because to do so will invoke the spectre of the Ikhwan against their name. Those who are imprisoned cannot speak, because to do so will only decrease their chances of a pardon or release.

And so all resort to ameliorating their conditions in whatever small way they can - except this is what existence looks like, not the freedom to live. As ElGendy's cellmate and friend Tooha noted one night:

"The constant push to improve prison life. We've accepted confinement as the norm, Gendy, and that's how they win."

Somewhere in the liminal space between I am imprisoned and I am a prisoner, we had stopped trying to climb the tree.

'Shame and treachery'

The tree cannot be climbed by negotiating a settlement with the security state, as the Muslim Brotherhood found out in its attempt at normalising the facade of democracy through elections. Nor can prison life be negotiated through nepotism, protecting one's own sanctified group at the expense of other siyasi (political prisoners) and gena'i (criminal prisoners), because the entire system oppresses them all.

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To fight our way out of this barzakh is to admit that "military rule is shame and treachery", a lesson most profoundly learnt in the midst of the genocide of the Palestinian people, where ElGendy ends his stunning account.

Seeing Egyptian soldiers take bribes from Palestinians, as ElGendy recounts, and an Egyptian state-linked firm charge them thousands of dollars each to escape, seeing Egyptian authorities bar access to humanitarians seeking to enter Gaza, and witnessing the repression of pro-Palestine sentiment reminds us that Egypt's military shame is tied inextricably to its role as a garrison for western interests.

Until we acknowledge this khiyana (treachery) and treat Egypt as a hostile entity, we will continue to normalise Egypt's role in the structure of violence that maintains the status quo of genocide.

ElGendy's memoir, Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, is the starting point for us to acknowledge the true face of Egypt, and the true face of the hostile entities that rule it. Through engaging with his profound reflections on his time in prison, we might better understand how we collectivise across our disparate groupings, and how we might eventually fight back.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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