In 2021, I began a project that examines Muslim carceral theologies, focusing on prisoners’ key expressions in rituals, theodicies, hermeneutics, and community. As I sat with former political prisoners, I found that their language was marked with a distinct tone regardless of where they had been detained. They used the first person to describe the mundane aspects of prison life and oscillated to the third person to depersonalize this experience as they described the most egregious acts. Often, their narratives morphed into a project of fact-finding as they listed dates and details with a keen desire to be fair to those who imprisoned them. When I spoke with Shaykh Al Muntassir, a former prisoner in the United Arab Emirates, about being held in a secret prison, he said, “Before they beat me, credit to them, they asked if I was epileptic or diabetic. I was honest with them. I could have lied so they wouldn’t beat me as hard. But glory be to God, because I was not used to lying, I couldn’t do it.”
I have been trained to speak in three voices. One that renders niche or particular pursuits legible to a largely disinterested academic audience. The academic’s craft is to hunt for compelling questions; the profession relies on intellectual stamina and voyeurism. My second voice is a voice passed down from my mentor, Mohammad Talib, who taught me that the researcher, who asks the first question, possesses a privilege, a power-laden tool: it can be a stick to beat and discipline or it can sound back some form of emancipation to those it seeks to study. The third is the voice of objectivity, facts, and analysis that I inherited from my father, a voice so steady and meticulous that it could not be obscured.
The phrase “credit to them’’ haunted me. It appeared in one iteration or another in many of my interviews. Is it because prisoners are never credited as credible narrators of their suffering that the notion of fairness and accuracy, especially towards their tormentors, permeates their language? Maybe it was the survivor’s guilt. Maybe they sought to be fair not to the perpetrator, but to the experiences of those they knew suffered more. Maybe the shadow of criminality is cast wide and creeps into speech long after prison, every dialogue an extension of the moment of interrogation. Maybe facts, details, and, indeed, objectivity are not so much a voice for former prisoners as a lingua franca capable of rendering criminality a mirage and their humanity an empirical fact. I don’t know.
I discussed the challenges and findings of this research with my colleague Asim Qureshi, a longtime advocate of prisoners incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. The more we shared stories, the more an intricate thread tying the experiences of our interlocutors together became apparent. It was at this moment that our book was born. In it, we relay and compare the narratives of prisoners in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, as I turned the first page of Fayez al-Kandari’s autobiography, I heard echoes of Shaykh Al Muntassir’s words. Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti national, was working as an aid worker in Afghanistan when he, like many, was abducted by Afghan warlords and then sold to the Americans. Al-Kandari asserts, “Guantanamo was not the worst prison in human history; there are prisons more monstrous, such as those administered by Bashar [Al Asad]’s guards of hell. Perhaps the one thing that distinguishes Guantanamo is that the Statue of Liberty built these prison walls and set the prisoners within it ablaze with her torch.”
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I can recall perhaps three times I sat and spoke with my father about his time in Egyptian prisons. I was about five or six years old when I first heard the story. My mother and paternal grandmother were talking to each other as I was playing in the corner of the room. Casually, they relayed how he was beaten to the point where he would lose consciousness, only to be revived with water and beaten again. In winter, he’d wake up to the pool of blood and water in his cell. My grandmother recalled the arduous journeys she undertook, while pregnant, to bring him food and how the police officers taunted her. One day, visitation hours ended before she could see him, but she glimpsed him from the corner of her eye. She charged across the officers to embrace him, only to be hauled back. The next week in visitation, she saw her son broken and bruised. He was tortured for her infraction. I could never quite see that vulnerable teenager in my father, a man who I always felt was larger than life.
The discontinuity between what my father experienced and my image of him continued to occupy my young mind. At ten, I was stuck in Cairo traffic with my father and his friend on our way to the dentist. A disheveled man, barefoot and with bruises on his face, screamed into the traffic. “The police are great! Long live President Mubarak! There is no torture in this country! There is no torture in this country!’’ I looked him in the eye, but his eyes were empty. Cars were passing him by. He was a ghost. No one acknowledged him or his words. With every negation, he said what everyone knew to be true. Still, they chose to not see or hear. This man’s words blurred the careful boundary between carceral and non-carceral worlds; the former seeped into the latter and vice versa, through his speech. It was not until my father’s friend looked down and muttered la hawla wala quwwata illa bi’Allah (There is no power and no strength except with God) that I felt less crazy. Someone was seeing what I was seeing.
I floated the idea for this autoethnographic essay to my father. As a political scientist, he found the intimacy between the observer and the observed, a hallmark of anthropology, not unscientific but also not not unscientific. We decided that this could be an introduction to an oral history that would relay the objective facts of his life, no matter how uncomfortable. However, every time my father and I sat for an interview, we looked each other in the eye, cracked a joke, and decided to postpone it to another time. Finally, he decided to record his memoirs and send them to me. In fusha (formal Arabic), he began narrating dates, details, and analytical observations about Egypt’s prisons in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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My father, Hamed Quisay, was born in the village of Dirshay in Lower Egypt. He experienced detention on three different occasions. He explains:
My first encounter with the security apparatus was when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I was not yet politicized. One day, a group of my classmates and I were chosen from our school […] to go to Damanhour to participate in a competition among different schools at the provincial level. This was around January 1977. We boarded a large bus, accompanied by a teacher. At the time, demonstrations against President Sadat were taking place. He dubbed it intifadat al-haramaya (the uprising of the thieves) […] Sadat deployed the army to control the protests. While we were driving, the security forces held our bus at a police camp near the State Security headquarters, on the outskirts of Damanhour. They detained us inside the bus and did not let us out for two or three days. This was my first prison. We were kids… I mean, we were young adults. We suffered, not knowing why [this happened] or what we had done. Many of us slept and woke up on the bus, and there was hardly any food. Three days later, they dropped us back at school. I returned to my village; no one cared what had happened to us.
After ascending to power, President Anwar El Sadat went on what he dubbed a ‘Corrective Revolution.’ He sought to reverse the socialist policies his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, put in place, promote free market economics, and move Egypt from the socialist camp to the Western camp. This exacerbated the economic crisis significantly and led to waves of dissent in 1977. The following year, Sadat ratified the Camp David Accords, and Egypt became the first Arab country to normalize relations with Israel.
My father continues:
I then moved to secondary school, where my religious and political consciousness continued to develop. […] I was often chosen to lead the school assembly, which the Arabic language and religion teacher encouraged and supervised. One day, I believe it was towards the end of 1978 or 1979, after President Sadat had signed the Camp David Accords, I criticized the Accords in the school assembly. I urged people to take action and learn from the events in Iran, where protests were happening, leading to the victory of the Iranian Revolution. The next day, I was summoned to the principal’s office. I was arrested from within the school, which was surrounded by security forces. It was said that the arrest was facilitated by one of the teachers — the same Arabic and religion teacher — who had handed over the morning assembly papers to State Security.
My father’s most extended period of imprisonment began in 1981. During this time, Sadat initiated a crackdown to suppress widespread opposition, holding intellectuals, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, student activists, and individuals who merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in pre-trial detention. My father remained in pre-trial detention even after Sadat was assassinated and Hosni Mubarak took power. He explains:
President Sadat issued a decree for the arrest of, if I recall correctly, 1536 individuals whom he labeled as heads of sedition and delusion, considering them a threat to national unity and social peace. The common issue that united all these people was their opposition to President Sadat’s foreign policy, particularly the peace with Israel, the Camp David Accords, and his alignment with the American and Western projects, in addition to his autocratic domestic policies. My arrest took place in what is now called the Dean Zaki Sha’fei Auditorium. We were in a lecture on international law with Professor Samaan Botros Faragallah. An informant entered the auditorium and gave him a paper with my name on it. Professor Faragallah understood the message that this student was wanted for arrest. He stopped the lecture, looked at me for a long time, and told me, “Go, my son, may God protect you. Prove you are a man in a time when men are scarce!’’ I later learned that he canceled the lecture after that and went to his office.
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Offering a carefully curated oral history, my father analyzed carceral theology: how prisoners engaged scripture and community, ablution and prayers, Eid celebrations, and funerals. My father would always reassure me that prison, to be fair, was not just torture. It was a place where you can learn about fiqh from one inmate and Dostoevsky from another. I half believed him, because I knew he was trying to protect me from my imagination. He did not describe the torture, but he said he saw his cellmates die as a result. He then said, in the spirit of fairness and accurate historical recording, “Of course, torture isn’t constant. They might be tortured for an hour, two, or three until they collapse, and then they are transferred to the cell.”
Still, absent the one-on-one dialogue I did not have with my father, I wondered about how he and I both had to construct our public voice within our institutions, developing a way of speaking about the purpose of knowledge production. I wondered about the futility Professor Samaan Botros must have faced, as an academic practitioner of law, when he could not use the tools he taught his students to protect them, and about the middle school teacher who found himself having to console his detained students and calm their hunger. Mostly, I wondered about the teacher who nurtured his students’ political consciousness, only to turn them in. I wondered about our place in schools and universities, about how we determine when and where speech is legible or criminal.