Laila Soueif: An Egyptian Mother Taking on the Sisi Regime Through a Hunger Strike

With a frail body and a shattered spirit, Egyptian activist and academic Laila Soueif lies in a sterile room at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital, her health ravaged by a prolonged hunger strike.

Doctors are now racing against time to save her from a critical downturn, as her blood sugar levels have plummeted to life-threatening lows — a development confirmed by her daughter, Mona Seif, on May 30, 2025.

Laila Soueif, the 69-year-old university professor and veteran political activist, has been waging a hunger strike for 242 days — a desperate act of protest against the continued detention of her son, Alaa Abdel Fattah, by the Egyptian authorities.

Alaa, a prominent political dissident, is now on the 91st day of his own hunger strike behind bars in Egypt. 

Despite having served the entirety of his legal sentence, he remains imprisoned — a fate shared by thousands of political detainees under the rule of the head of the regime, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Laila’s Hunger Strike

Since fully renouncing food on September 29, 2024, Soueif has lost 36 kilograms from her original weight. 

As her body began to visibly waste away, she shifted in February 2025 to a partial hunger strike, sustaining herself on just 300 calories a day via nutritional supplements.

For Soueif, hunger has become the final weapon in a seemingly endless battle with the Sisi regime. Despite her deteriorating health, she returned to Cairo in mid-May, carrying new legal petitions for a presidential pardon — a last-ditch effort to secure her son’s release.

She also submitted requests to the Public Prosecutor to count pretrial detention time and filed a legal motion to halt the execution of her son’s sentence—an effort that coincided with a further decline in her physical and mental health.

But the weight of disappointment proved heavier than her frail body. By the end of May, Soueif announced she was resuming her full hunger strike, declaring, “Backing down was a mistake I won’t repeat. Nothing has changed. Nothing has happened.”

Despite the toll, Laila Soueif has found solace in the solidarity of those who have stood by her—a quiet comfort in her long battle against official silence and sealed doors. 

She thanked supporters for what she described as “the enormous risk” they took in joining her repeated calls for freedom.

On May 22, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a call with Egyptian head of the regime Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a renewed push to secure the release of Alaa Abdel Fattah, imprisoned for years despite holding both Egyptian and British citizenship—a dual identity that, so far, has failed to shield him from the machinery of repression.

As Soueif’s full hunger strike once again pushes her fragile body to the brink, her fight is no longer just her own. 

It has come to represent the struggle of thousands of Egyptian mothers whose sons remain locked away in overcrowded prison cells, far from justice and from home.

Who is Laila Soueif?

Laila Soueif was born on May 1, 1956, in London, where her mother, Fatma Moussa, was pursuing postgraduate studies. 

The family returned to Cairo when Laila was just two years old—bringing with her not only a British passport but also the beginnings of a life steeped in scholarship and dissent.

She was raised in an intellectually vibrant household: her father, Dr. Mostafa Soueif, was a pioneering professor of psychology at Cairo University, while her mother would go on to become one of Egypt’s most prominent scholars of English literature.

From an early age, Laila Soueif displayed a remarkable aptitude for mathematics—an intellectual spark her father, ever the perceptive academic, nurtured with care.

It was a path she would follow with unwavering dedication, carving out a lifelong career in academia that remains central to her identity.

She married the prominent human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif el-Islam, who passed away in 2024. Together, they raised three children—Alaa Abdel Fattah, Sanaa, and Mona—all of whom would become vocal figures in Egypt’s struggle for justice. Her sister, Ahdaf Soueif, is one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists.

Laila Soueif continued her higher education in France at the University of Poitiers, where in 1989 she earned a PhD in pure mathematics with a dissertation entitled “Transfer of Properties for the Extension Equation.”

Since then, she has been a lecturer in the mathematics department at Cairo University’s Faculty of Science, regularly participating in international academic conferences. 

Her career has been marked by a striking duality—balancing her scholarly pursuits with active engagement in political activism—an intersection that has defined both her personal and professional journey.

A Political Activist

But her academic career was only one facet of a life deeply entwined with political and social activism. 

She had not yet reached her sixteenth birthday when, driven by youthful outrage at the regime’s crackdown on university students in December 1971, she took to the streets for her first protest, marching from Cairo University’s campus all the way to Tahrir Square.

The year 1972 marked the beginning of her political engagement amid a peak in student activism, confronting the stalled promises of then-president Anwar Sadat in what was dubbed the “postponed reckoning.” 

Students were pushing the regime towards a decisive conflict to reclaim Sinai, which was then under Israeli occupation.

In the new millennium, Leila was among those who revitalized the concept of academic independence in Egyptian universities.

In 2003, she joined a group of university professors to found the “Working Group for University Independence,” which later became known as the “March 9 Movement.”

The movement waged prolonged battles against the encroachment of security forces on university campuses, holding its first conference in 2004 after a hard-fought struggle with Cairo University’s administration.

Leila’s activism, however, extended far beyond the university walls. In April 2008, as the city of el-Mahalla el-Kubra rose up against security crackdowns during a massive workers’ strike, she emerged as one of the key figures launching a solidarity campaign to break the physical and psychological siege imposed by the security apparatus on the city.

A Family Paying the Price

It seems fate wove intertwined threads between her academic and activist lives from the very start — a path she shared with her late husband, the prominent human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif el-Islam.

He too paid a heavy price for his convictions, serving five years in prison during the 1980s after being accused of belonging to a banned leftist organization.

Since then, Laila Seif’s family has become a symbol of Egypt’s human rights struggle, paying the price generation after generation.

In October 2014, the family faced a new tragedy when Cairo’s criminal court sentenced her daughter, Sanaa Seif, to three years in prison.

She was charged under the newly enacted protest law, in a trial that saw 22 other young activists convicted amid a growing wave of repression against dissent.

In response to the imprisonment of her daughter Sanaa and son Alaa, Layla and her other daughter, Mona Seif, embarked on a hunger strike in September that year, protesting against arbitrary arrests. 

The strike lasted 76 days before they were forced to end it amid official indifference to their ongoing suffering.

The family’s ordeal deepened years later when Alaa Abdel Fattah was imprisoned again in December 2021, accused of “spreading false news undermining national security.”

Despite having served his full sentence by 29 September 2024, the authorities refused to release him, extending his detention until 2027 in a blatant escalation of their torment.

Leila’s Struggle

From the very day her son was meant to be released from prison, Layla Seif, then aged 68, began a hunger strike—a desperate attempt to compel both the Egyptian and British authorities to honor their laws and international obligations towards Alaa, who holds dual citizenship.

Since then, the frail figure of the activist has become a familiar sight on the streets of London, standing each morning outside the Foreign Office in Westminster and later outside Downing Street, clutching a small placard that simply counts the days of her son’s unlawful detention.

For months, she survived on nothing but water, unsweetened tea and coffee, and electrolyte salts.

As her health deteriorated, in January 2025 she was joined by Australian journalist Peter Greste—who had previously shared a cell with Alaa in Tora prison—in a 21-day solidarity hunger strike.

By February 2025, doctors warned that her frail body was teetering on the brink of fatal danger, with dangerously low blood sugar, blood pressure, and sodium levels necessitating emergency hospitalization in London. 

Meanwhile, her family intensified urgent appeals for the UK to intervene and save Alaa.

Laila resumed her near-total hunger strike and reinstated her daily silent vigil outside Downing Street, sending a repeated message to the British government, “My son’s freedom must be at the top of your priorities in dealings with Cairo.”

Al Jazeera captured the essence of her story years ago in a documentary, describing her as “one of the true heroines of the [Egyptian] revolution.”

In a 2006 interview with the site Islam Online, Laila Seif expressed her deep empathy for the suffering of Palestinian and Arab women living under occupation.

“I feel a deep sympathy for Palestinians, especially Palestinian women; Arab women in Palestine and Iraq raise their children under incredibly harsh and difficult conditions, continuing to educate them despite the occupation.”

“In my view, a significant part of Palestinian society’s resilience and continued resistance against the occupation is owed to the efforts of women—the sacrifices they make for their children, and their ability to adapt and persevere under the daily hardships they endure,” Seif added.

When asked about what drives Palestinian women to carry out suicide attacks alongside men, she responded, “The immense pressures Palestinian women face within their society, alongside oppression, colonialism, and inhumane treatment, sometimes make life unbearable.”

“This harshness compels Palestinians—both men and women—to resist and even seek revenge. While such acts may seem ineffective to some, they remain the only means available to respond to the atrocities of occupation; silence, in the end, will not change the reality of oppression,” Seif continued.