Abdelaty not jailed for quacking like a duck

Last week, the Cairo Economic Court sentenced Mohamed Abdelaty, the creator of the channel Ma Kamel Ehtiramy/With Full Respect, to two years in prison and fined him 100,000 pounds (about $2,000), on a charge of “broadcasting indecent content.”

Ten years earlier I also stood in the dock, similarly charged with “violating public decency,” after a chapter of my novel “Istikhdam Al-Haya/Using Life” was published. At the time, the appeals court sentenced me to two years. I served one year in prison before the Court of Cassation ordered my release and sent the case back to the Cairo Criminal Court, which found me guilty again but reduced the punishment to a fine.

Afterward, I left Egypt for the USA, where I completed an MA in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For the past three years I have taught writing to students from various nationalities, and in the coming semester I will teach a course on literature and writing that “offends” authority and decency.

I was the first person to be imprisoned under that article of the Criminal Code. At the time, legal and constitutional experts—including some who helped draft the 2014 constitution—said the sentence contradicted the constitutional clause prohibiting imprisonment in cases involving publication or public expression, except in specific situations: incitement to violence, discrimination, or attacking someone’s honor.

While I was in prison, MPs attempted to amend the legal articles that allow imprisonment in publication cases. Their initiative stalled halfway, and the Egyptian parliament has since stumbled through a series of crises that brought it to its current suspended state—as everyone knows.

The banality and failure of repression

From 2016 until today, hundreds have been prosecuted and imprisoned on charges of “violating public decency” or similar publication-related accusations. Defendants do not know their own crime. Charges do not identify a sentence or a word. Judges issue featureless rulings, as if written in the writer’s absence. And Egyptian society, as usual, swings between two poles: those applauding because a new victim has arrived on whom they can vent their frustration, and others shouting in bewilderment to drown out the sound of their own fear.

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi repeatedly refers in his speeches to a “moral crisis.” And with every presidential directive to address this persistent concern of his, the responsible agencies move only towards more censorship and arrests. Nothing improves. And we still do not understand the origin of the “moral crisis” used to justify all these measures.

More importantly, despite the escalation of crackdowns over ten years, these campaigns have not succeeded in improving public morals or behavior in Egyptian society, according to the president’s own recent statements. So why do the authorities insist on the same policies? Is it stubbornness? Or simply a way to avoid the political and societal work required to address “morality” and the president’s directives?

To this day, I do not know why I spent a full year in prison. Neither the prosecution’s argument nor the reasoning in the verdict identified the sentences or words that supposedly violated public decency.

I no longer care to know.

If there was a phrase in my novel that violated decency, Mohamed Abdelaty, the 23-year-old Egyptian content creator, was far more cautious. He avoids any topic that invites thought or challenges social norms. He goes even further, bleeping out every sensitive word in his videos with the sound of a duck quacking, known as the “oh no” sound on social media.

And yet, he was not spared. He was arrested in September, and last week he was sentenced to two years in prison after a Cairo economic court found him guilty of violating public morals and misusing social media platforms.

Mohamed’s friends and fellow content creators are now at a loss. No one knows where the red line lies or what “public morals” or “family values” they are expected not to touch.

Each whispers a guess: Maybe that episode? Maybe that guest?

Then they fall silent, swallow the question, and move through life in fear of an unnamed, unknowable threat. Justice becomes a hall of mirrors: you are accused of something that cannot be identified, convicted of something that cannot be defined, and expected to apologize for something no one can see.

From the heart of this maze, fear is born. Not fear of prison alone, but fear of the unnamed—a phantom you cannot grasp or avoid.

The audience, intoxicated by the fascist thrill of “clean the filth,” applauds every ruling and confiscation. Yet deep down, they are not satisfied. They look around and hear things far more obscene than Abdelaty’s duck sound. They find themselves, driven by the banality of evil, gloating over the imprisonment of blogger X or Y—only to feel deceived when they turn on the television.

There, in official festivals and elite parties, they see displays far more offensive to “Egyptian family values” than a girl dancing in her bedroom or a divorced mother trying to support her children by eating stuffed cabbage on camera.

The sovereignty of fear

As the machinery of imprisonment grinds on, morals do not improve. Content creators cannot understand the rules they must obey to avoid the crushing fist. And the public has no idea why one person is jailed while another is honored. They end up feeling resentful, as the class bias in law enforcement becomes painfully clear.

But the punitive machine is indifferent to these contradictions. It works endlessly—without logic, without purpose, without any vision of the society it seeks to shape. It has ceased to be a tool for social order. It has become the supreme value on which official society rests.

In all this, the real victim is the family.

When I heard about Abdelaty’s arrest, the first person I thought of was his father. I saw his videos pleading for his son’s return, and the posts on his profile—a long chain of prayers asking God to lift the burden and restore his son to his arms.

I think of this father, of his family, of his son who should have been his support in old age. Instead, the family is dragged from police station to police station, from court to court, then to the weekly prison visit—with its humiliations and crushing expenses. My heart is with them. For their sake, we all hope for Mohamed’s release and the release of all prisoners of conscience in Egypt.

I know this dream will not be fulfilled soon. But I also know that Mohamed Abdelaty will be free—if not tomorrow, then next week, or the one after. Every prisoner eventually walks out. And when he does, like so many before him—writers, actors, content creators—he will likely leave Egypt. He will go to Dubai or Saudi Arabia and resume his work from there.

His small company in Cairo will shut down. His staff will lose their jobs. The foreign currency his work brought into Egypt will shift to his new home abroad. His content will become part of a media discourse that is not Egyptian. The only loser is Egypt, which continues to hemorrhage its human talent—people who now emigrate not just for wealth or a better life, but simply to breathe the air of freedom they are denied in their own country.

The truth is that Abdelaty’s imprisonment has nothing to do with protecting public decency or saving “family values.” The goal is to entrench the sovereignty of fear. The state no longer needs the old tactic of punishing one person to scare the rest—the tactic used when I was imprisoned.

Today, the system is stable. Its dominance is not under threat. Censorship and punishment have become its operating logic—its essence, not an exceptional measure. A state that does not need danger to strike, nor a threat to feel afraid. Fear has become the structure of the system, not its reaction.

The state’s notion of “family values” can now be summarized in one word: fear. The ideal citizen is the one who is always afraid. Fear with no specific object, not to protect him from dangerous ideas, but to create a silent person who opens his mouth only to bark: “Good, clean the filth.”

The purpose of the censorial and punitive machinery is not to punish Abdelaty—neither he nor anyone else knows what he supposedly did wrong. Its purpose is to strangle any chance of rational discussion that might open space to talk about the constitution, the law, citizens’ rights, or freedom of expression. Instead, the debate is reduced to barking: between those who want things “cleaned up” and those feigning astonishment—“How can someone be jailed over a quack?”—rather than expressing solidarity grounded in a commitment to freedom of expression.

The real question is not why Abdelaty was imprisoned, nor what was indecent about the quack. The question is: How do we escape this infernal circle of fear? How do we stop loved ones from going through prisons and exile? How do we return to the values we need to live as human beings—the right to express ourselves, to organize, to believe, to breathe without fear?

And to remind ourselves always: we are all free, and we all deserve to speak without fearing a duck’s quack or an iron cage.