‘I am a hostage in my own country, but I will never forgive the Brotherhood’

“Egypt is free… the Brotherhood is out.”

My father hears the chanting the moment I call him, right after the armed forces’ statement on the evening of July 3, 2013, as I stand celebrating the fall of Brotherhood rule in front of Ittihadiya Presidential Palace. Over the line, mixed with his voice, I hear the roar of the angry crowds staging their sit-in at Rabaa Al-Adawiya square, trying to absorb the shock of their collapse: “Down, down with military rule!”

I ask my father: “What’s the situation where you are?”

He answers: “This anger doesn’t promise anything good. And you?”

I reply: “The joy is indescribable.” Then I ask: “Don’t the leaders of the organization feel any regret? Why didn’t they listen to you, or to any sane voice that tried to steer them away from this?”

He answers again: “The duty of the moment is not to settle accounts, but to salvage what we can, so it doesn’t turn into total darkness for everyone. The duty of the moment is to find a way to convince whoever is commanding the army and police armored vehicles surrounding the protesters in Rabaa to pull back far enough to prevent clashes. Any anger now could easily spin out of control.”

He hung up and went to find someone he could negotiate with, trying to convince them to pull back until the first wave of shock passed.

According to my father and the friend who went with him, he found who he was looking for, and his attempt to prevent bloodshed that night succeeded.

But that successful attempt would be his last. My father paid for his next attempt to protect lives with his life. His face turned into fragments that I gathered with my own hands, so the doctor could piece his features back together, so my mother could kiss his face one last time before he was gone from us forever.

Questions of remembrance

My father died, but the questions about how else his life might have gone do not. I ask myself before writing these lines on the anniversary of July 3: Would I be writing this if my father were still alive? If someone had listened to him—to any sane voice—would we have ever reached June 30?

My father, Mohamed Ali, was among those responsible within the Muslim Brotherhood for preparing the studies, visions, and situational assessments that guided the organization’s decisions. Along with others, he also trained and qualified its grassroots members and leaders. To the media, he appeared only as an administrative development expert; his real role was building the internal structure of the organization and ensuring its stability.

Now, when I look back at the days I chanted “Down with the rule of the Guide!” amidst angry crowds, just as I had chanted before, “The people want the fall of the regime,” I don’t know for sure if I was rejecting their rule out of genuine political consciousness, out of fear for my country, or because of a lifetime of resentment built up since my childhood—forced into a world I never chose because my father joined the group in his teens.

Or maybe it was because I knew too much, having seen firsthand the follies the organization committed after Mubarak’s fall—details I was privy to because of my father’s role. Maybe it was all of these things combined.

Do I regret taking part in June 30? I can’t pin down my feelings now. All I know is that I never wanted to be ruled by a religious-political organization. But nor did I want to live in a country in which my brother spends his twelfth year in prison, watching his youth bleed away inside a cell after being arrested by mistake. Nor did I ever hope my father would be killed.

I never imagined that, ten years after chanting against the organization, I would end up with a post-traumatic stress disorder that steals away my memory, spending years with a medical team trying to heal me. Traumas inflicted by an organization that hijacked my life and treated me from birth as its rightful possession; as well as traumas dealt by my own country, which holds me responsible for being the daughter of the man killed in Rabaa.

I never dreamed of a homeland that bars me from working in its institutions, yet drags me into its television studios whenever it wants to attack the Brotherhood, expecting me to speak of the bitterness of life in their shadow and the danger of religious-political groups.

Then, that very same media turns around and violates my private life because it “intersects” with the organization. I lose the right to any personal space. I can’t object when they steal my photos or publish my private details. I don’t even have the power to protect my own words from being twisted, cut, and rewritten to say things I never said.

I visit my father in the cemetery and my brother in prison, and every morning the feeling grows that I am a hostage in my own country. But I will never forgive the Brotherhood

So when I search my heart for an honest answer about whether I feel pride or regret over June 30, only one voice rings in my head: Why didn’t God make me a penguin? “I want to live with the penguins.” There…there is no room for the questions that exhaust the soul and the mind.

I visit my father in the cemetery and my brother in prison, and every morning the feeling grows that I am a hostage in my own country. But I will never forgive the Brotherhood—not for the life stolen from me behind their walls, not for my father’s death, and not for my brother’s imprisonment. This doesn’t mean I forgive those who violated me in the name of the nation. But I don’t know what went on inside their closed rooms; I only know what I witnessed behind the walls of the Brotherhood and its ruling regime.

Perhaps I don’t have a definitive answer to the question: “What if they had listened to my father?” He told me of a thousand opportunities the organization threw away of its own free will. Perhaps we could have rewritten this chapter in the story of our country, and of my family.

Days of wasted opportunities

“The Battle of the Ballot Boxes” is the most famous phrase in search engines when you look up the 2011 constitutional amendments. It is true that the man who said it, the Salafi preacher Mohamed Hussein Yacoub, was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he was allied with them at the time to mobilize the “Yes” vote, running counter to most other political parties, movements, intellectuals, and politicians.

My father’s opinion, which he shared with my siblings and me, and which he told us he had presented to the leadership at the time, was to preserve the state of national unity Tahrir Square had forged in its early days. He believed the organization should push for writing an entirely new constitution, rather than settling for mere amendments, drawing proposals from representatives of the entire population.

He saw this as a way to strengthen the Brotherhood’s presence on the street, an opportunity to build a broader political base and popular support. Others in his department—the branch responsible for situational assessments and advice—shared his view. But the Brotherhood’s leadership ignored the counsel of the very people they had appointed to guide them.

When the parliamentary elections arrived in late 2011, my father advised the leadership, as he told me, to stick to the principle of “participation, not domination.” He urged them not to contest too many seats, leaving room for independent candidates and political parties that lacked the Brotherhood’s formidable organizing machinery, resources, and funds. They did the exact opposite.

Then he argued against entering the presidential race, warned against the constitutional declaration, and knocked on every door to stop the rank-and-file from taking to the streets for what became known as the Ittihadiya clashes. The leadership turned a deaf ear.

“Our people at the top”

I signed the Tamarod petition the moment it launched. My father watched the movement’s expansion with deep interest, asking me about the actual number of signees, trying to convince the leadership that the public anger was real. But those inside the organization known as “our people at the top”—always spoken of with the reflex tag, “they know everything, they know what they’re doing”—dismissed him.

He told my brother and me that they assured him the movement was nothing more than “a bunch of kids,” old-regime remnants, a church mobilization, and the families of police and soldiers. They insisted the army would step in to crush it the moment it posed any real threat to their rule.

The organization’s stubbornness held until the night of June 26, 2013, when Morsi gave his infamous speech—the one that became known as the “Fouda, Ashour, and the guy who takes twenty pounds to pull down the power switch” speech. That was his summary of the country’s crises.

I was listening to the speech while sitting in with the protesters at the Ministry of Culture. I called my father, who was on a work trip in Yemen, and mocked Morsi’s words, but my father cared about only one thing: the look on the face of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the defense minister. In El-Sisi’s expressions, my father read deep dissatisfaction. He dismissed the leadership’s constant assurances that El-Sisi would protect Morsi’s presidency, predicting instead that El-Sisi would back the street if it moved on June 30.

My father abandoned his work and flew back to Egypt the next morning to meet with the leaders. He wanted to convince them that the game was up, that they had to, in his words, “turn the tables” by calling early presidential elections, or at least a public referendum on whether Morsi should finish his term or step down. But one of the leaders—whose name I won’t mention because he is now in prison and cannot defend himself—told him: “Don’t worry…we’ve got the army in our pocket.”

Attempting to seize the last opportunity

On the morning of June 30, 2013, I was out with the demonstrators marching from the Ministry of Culture. My father and others who shared his concern called me constantly, asking about the crowds: Were they real? Did they represent the actual public, or were they just church crowds and central security forces, as others were telling the organization?

I told them, with absolute certainty, that the anger was real. When the military issued its 48-hour ultimatum, my father and his colleagues tried to convince the leadership that this was their last chance to exit power peacefully and secure a place in the future, warning that otherwise they would be dragged out by force, losing everything.

The organization clung to its stubbornness, betting that the sit-ins at Rabaa and Nahda, along with international pressure, would protect their rule. The army’s deadline expired. On the evening of July 3, 2013, the military statement was read, ending the rule of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even that didn’t break their obstinacy. My father kept advising them, and they kept ignoring him, right up until their final argument three nights before the sit-ins were dispersed. My father told us the security apparatuses had leaked the date of the dispersal to the Brotherhood, warning that they would clear the squares completely, whatever the cost. He tried to convince the remaining leaders to voluntarily disperse the sit-in to save lives, but no one listened. Some even accused him of working for state security.

The last account I have of my father comes from a friend who saw him on the day of the Rabaa dispersal. He was furious at the rhetoric coming from the main stage. The speakers were shouting to the protesters, “O people of Badr, stand firm! This is your day,” casting them as the early Muslims at the Battle of Badr.

My father saw in the moment a parallel with the battle of Mu’tah, when Khalid Ibn Al-Walid was named the “Drawn Sword of God” precisely because he pulled the Muslim army back, saving lives in a conflict that was already lost.

It was his preservation of life that earned him that title, not staying to fight a battle he could not win. That was what my father had taught me when we studied the Prophet’s biography from the organization’s own curriculum. That was the language he wanted to hear from the stage on the day of the dispersal.

In prison, my brother heard a story from other inmates who had been at Rabaa. They said my father tried to open a safe passage once the shooting intensified and the official routes designated by the Interior Ministry became unreachable.

According to their testimony, my father convinced some of the security officers on the ground to open an extra exit for women and children. He succeeded, standing there himself to guide them out safely. But two of his own colleagues from his organizational unit drove the women back inside and shut the corridor. I verified this story myself with three female members of the Brotherhood who had tried to escape under my father’s protection.

As for the other “safe passages” announced by the ministry before the clearance began, those testimonies confirmed they were traps—people trying to use them were shot or arrested.

In the end, my father’s blood spilled among the very lives he had tried to save. His body went missing for two days, before turning up in a side street near the Zeinhom morgue. Ever since, whenever the anniversaries of June 30, July 3, and August 14 arrive, the questions of his life and death return to haunt me, along with that single question: What if the organization had listened to him?

Most of the leadership still insists the outcome would have been the same—that a coup was inevitable against any elected president, and that no retreat by the Brotherhood could have changed their fate.

But those answers don’t satisfy me, nor do they quiet the questions in my head. I find myself asking: If they had listened to my father, would Egypt be a paradise now?

And if I hadn’t chanted “Down with the rule of the Guide,” would my father still be alive, and my brother free?

I feel these endless questions and alternative scenarios spinning in my head, bringing me close to losing my memory all over again. Then my mind triggers its survival instinct, shutting down the questions, reducing all the noise to a single inquiry…

Why didn’t God make me a penguin?