For many of us who follow the news from Egypt and the Arab region, the online publication Mada Masr is an unequivocal treasure. That it exists at all, in a country that treats journalism as a crime, can feel like a minor miracle. On 27 October, a Cairo court convicted Lina Attalah, Mada Masr’s courageous co-founder and editor-in-chief, of running an unlicensed website and “spreading false information”. The court ordered the publication’s closure, imposed a fine of three million Egyptian pounds, and held her until it was paid in full. Lina’s arrest was part of a wider press crackdown across Egypt; over 28 and 29 September, six journalists from the fact-checking platform Matsada2sh were taken from their homes and the streets of Cairo and remain in custody.

Of course, this is not the first time Lina has run up against the censures of the Egyptian state. We asked four writers with intimate knowledge of Mada’s work to communicate why the publication matters and why all partisans of a free press should be paying attention to her case.

To Lose Mada is to Lose a Home
by Abdelrahman ElGendy

I smuggled my first published essay out of prison to Lina Attalah in a ball of dirty socks. Her editorial letter came back folded into a fresh pair of boxers. I was 22 and had never published anything beyond the prison missives my family shared on social media. Arrested at 17 for protesting Egypt’s 2013 military coup, I spent six years and three months behind bars. I wrote my way through dozens of notebooks, tucking them into my visitation laundry bags. I went on to publish six more essays with Mada Masr from prison and, after my release in 2020, a series on my years inside that became the seed of a memoir.

With the enraging news that Mada may be facing closure and as Lina once again stands trial on spurious charges for haunting the Egyptian state with her work, I have been thinking about what it would mean to lose this bastion of independent media. Mada is not only where I became a writer, but one of the last remaining archives where the scattered history of our revolution lives.

In prison, we smuggled in state newspapers and watched as the events of 2011 were erased and rewritten before our eyes. Our families told us about television programmes that vilified revolutionaries as foreign agents and recast state massacres as justifiable – even necessary. We were living in the wake of a revolutionary rupture that we were told had never happened. We witnessed in real time the emergence of a new reality engineered by the state, and from within it, we – its prisoners – were excised from history.

I ached to leave traces, to make accessible a record of how we had struggled and organised, broken down and survived, found tenderness behind prison walls that were designed to make love impossible. Mada Masr offered an aperture through which I could smuggle my stories to the world and, in return, learn about the world outside of prison. I still remember the transcendence when I received that first editorial letter, for a piece about my friend Ammad, who had died of medical negligence in prison. How it felt to know someone had sat with what I had written, reckoned with it, edited it, and cared for it enough to usher it into the world. How intimate the exchange – how loving.

Our revolutionary memory is fragile. Its fragments live in prison letters, photographs, poems, songs, and the recollections of people scattered across borders and bars. Mada has brought us together, gathered our fragments into a rare archive. But I keep returning to something even more intimate, and therefore more dangerous. For those of us who have been exiled, imprisoned, scattered, cast off, for the broken dreamers and for those who carry the visceral alienation of ghourba, Mada has been one of the last places where we could still find one another. Who among us isn’t haunted by Graffiti for Two, in which prisoners Alaa Abd El Fattah and Ahmed Douma write with and towards one another, shouting through their cells’ respective peepholes? Have you read Lina’s 2014 essay on the sound of prison? Or Nada Arafat’s haunting report on prison letters? What other outlet would publish an editorial that is a collective meditation on the separation of prisoners from their loved ones, told through letters and secret phone calls?

Amid the Egyptian state’s project to bury the revolution by making us strangers to one another, I read Mada to feel less alone. To remember that we were there, that this happened, that another world was – is – possible. To reassure myself that we are, despite our defeat, many.

Abdelrahman Elgendy is the author of Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Dear Lina
by Ursula Lindsey

During the 18 days of street protests that in 2011 eventually toppled President Hosni Mubarak, Lina Attalah was the managing editor of Egypt Independent, the English-language website of a major local newspaper. We all spent our days in and out of Tahrir Square, the locus of the protests, but I believe Lina lived there: she and her team set up makeshift offices in one of the hotels overlooking the square, and reported on the ground continuously. Like many Egyptian journalists of her generation, Lina discovered journalism’s possibilities during the Arab Spring; like only a handful of others, she has never given up on them.

We first met in the early 2000s at the offices of the Cairo Times, a scrappy independent magazine run by a gaggle of young people. I remember her as a shy intern, wide-eyed and extremely quiet; I was a slightly less shy copyeditor. But now I wonder whether this is my memory at all, or the shared memory of others who also knew her back then and have talked about her so many times since – marvelling at how that young woman became the founder of a publication that has been a pillar of free speech and investigative journalism in Egypt for more than a decade.

When Egypt Independent folded in 2013, Lina almost immediately launched Mada Masr. It was born in the midst of crisis: the ferocious, agonising summer when a second wave of protests broke out against the Muslim Brotherhood, the army removed President Mohamed Morsi, the security forces massacred his supporters, and General Abdel Fattah El Sisi began building the regime that has ruled Egypt ever since.

I worked for Mada Masr as a special features editor. That year I spent long days at the Mada offices, which were around the corner from my house in Garden City, smoking cigarettes on the balcony, batting around story ideas. I remember that Lina always made time to talk; she was supportive and curious, interested in exploring not just journalistic practices and methods but arts criticism, social theory, literature.

The two stories I remember most clearly working on at that time were an investigation into the corruption of the Mubarak family and an analysis of the use of sexual violence by the state as a political weapon. I recently reread both pieces – the first by human rights lawyer Hossam Bahgat, the second by the writer Sarah Carr – and, like much of Mada’s best reporting, they stand the test of time. While publishing this kind of groundbreaking work, Mada was simultaneously creating spaces for dialogue and community. Weekly breakfasts hosted distinguished guests for no-holds-barred discussions, and the publication threw big dance parties for its readers and subscribers, back when it was still possible to hold such events. Before I left Cairo in 2014, one of my last nights was spent at a rooftop Mada gathering – we balanced paper plates on our laps, ducked under strings of coloured lights, laughed through the sadness of saying goodbye.

In the years of repression that followed – the site blocked, the offices raided, the many interrogations, detentions and court hearings – Mada never stopped adapting, resisting, asking questions (including of itself), and finding creative ways to exist within a shrinking space. It published stories that no foreign media would ever be capable of reporting, and that very few domestic outlets would dare to: on the companies profiting from the evacuation of Gazans to Egypt during the genocide; on the appalling conditions and abuses within the country’s ever-expanding archipelago of prisons.

Mada’s survival in spite of everything remained a huge relief; it felt like a miracle, a small wonder that, perhaps, I began to take for granted.

I most recently saw Lina last October at a gathering of editors, publishers and writers in France. She was often on the phone, dealing with work issues back home; but as always she talked very little of any difficulties she might be facing. She spent our time together asking me questions about my life, my work, my family. She told me to visit Cairo again soon and to come see Mada’s current office. She talked about how much she loved its garden, what a haven it was.

We also talked about the detention of the entire staff of Matsada2sh (“Don’t Believe It”) – a fact-checking site that simply uses publicly available information to explain the news. Mada Masr covered the nighttime raids of its journalists’ homes – the way they were blindfolded, their devices seized, their families lied to – just as it covered the detentions of so many reporters, activists, influencers and artists, on ridiculous or nonexistent charges. One of Mada’s many functions has been to act as a record and an advocate for people that the regime would like to disappear.

Lina has spent years of her life fighting for the freedom of others. It is sickening to think she should be deprived of her own.

She would be the first to say that Mada Masr is bigger than her. I agree, but I must insist on how exceptional she is – her kindness, humility and courage. The thoughtfulness and attentiveness and quiet daring with which she has carried out her work under pressures I find unimaginable. The million ways she has gone above and beyond to help others.

Mada Masr is an archive of hope, a living link to a time that has been erased; it is space to breathe, and a promise that things might some day get better. For me as a journalist, it is an enduring reference point. It is the example that comes to mind when I think of the best our often imperfect, self-regarding profession has to offer. It is journalism as a dangerous, generous, radical, patient, collective endeavour.

You can’t sustain this kind of work, can’t build this kind of dedication, without a daily practice of caring for each other and taking risks for each other, but also having fun together, which is why Mada has also always tried to cultivate joy and lightness alongside seriousness.

In 2019, after Mada published a story about how Sisi’s son had been sidelined within the General Intelligence Service, the reporter Shady Zalat was arrested at his home and the offices of Mada were raided. Lina wrote about the fits of nervous laughter that broke out in the office during the raid, which made the security officers themselves lose their countenance; about holding hands with her fellow editors, handcuffed in a police van that suddenly, through some unknown last-minute intervention, did not take them to prison. She wrote: “In reality, I think I’d rather be a prisoner than a writer or an editor of this story. But the deeper reality, the real reality, is that I neither wish to be a prisoner, nor do I wish to write or edit this story.”

Mada has fought its battles for years, dealt with the maddening twists and turns inherent to the pursuit of justice in Egypt. Its staff is ready to go on as long as they can. “We understand that a sword will most likely be raised above our heads very soon,” the team wrote in an unforgettable editorial days after the charges were filed. The text was written with honesty and humour, and a philosophy I associate most of all with Lina: the determination to seize the moment, dancing on the very edge of loss. “We will go to court on Tuesday while continuing to publish Sunday through Saturday. And we are open to receiving love letters in the middle.” This one is mine.

Ursula Lindsey is a journalist, editor, and co-host of the podcast BULAQ. She spent two decades reporting from North Africa and the Middle East.

Present Tense
by Yasmin El-Rifae

In the darkest times, Lina and her colleagues at Mada sometimes say that their work is about creating a document for the future. In Arabic, “Mada” means “horizon” – it implies a forward-looking gaze, an orientation to futures that can be dreamt or imagined.

As the state attempts to shut down the newspaper, I want to ponder what Mada offers us in the present. At its base, it creates a space for us to think, to be thinking beings, amid conditions of tiresome and occasionally terrifying authoritarianism.

It does this, I believe, in two ways. First, with the work it publishes, which allows readers to know something about the relationships that shape their material reality. It helps its audience understand the devaluation of the currency needed to pay rent; what, exactly, is happening at the border between Egypt and the genocide in Gaza; how the film and television industries have changed; or why it might be that women are arrested for dancing on TikTok and what that might signal about the power – and the vulnerability – of bodies on screens.

This kind of journalism does more than just provide information; it summons a public, and creates possibilities for thinking about how the social, political, and economic realms interact – how they bear on us and our immediate surroundings. What we find difficult or suffocating, what we want for ourselves or for others, what we might simply be curious about.

When the norm is for information to be guarded like a state secret, for the exact same headlines to appear simultaneously across newspapers and websites owned by state intelligence, for people who “speak about politics” to disappear from their homes in the middle of the night, these possibilities for independent thought represent hard-won paths. They are dug and kept clear of debris through social and political enterprise, and this is the second way that Mada serves its communities – through a tenacious commitment to its journalism, no matter how trying the circumstances.

At best, this way of being feels airy; it buzzes with possibility. At darker moments, it feels like rolling up your sleeves, gritting your teeth, and steeling yourself for what, in the end, no one asked you to do, but which you had to do, because it is how you find a way through.

“No one asked me to do this. Life would have been better as a beauty technician/teacher/deep sea diver/doctor/working some neat job where I helped people and maybe made more money.”

If your work is with Mada, you are relieved and encouraged by the wins: the writer whose argument you helped structure, the reporting from Sudan carried out by former students of the regional journalism school you helped set up, the ability to break blockbuster investigations and then joke about which other newspapers cite you and which do not, as they use the work you produced on a broken and blocked website.

You move on and off these collective and individual paths, with your questions and your information. You begin to understand things differently, and maybe you bring someone along with you, someone whose area of focus is different than yours but who is also looking for a path. You move in and out of spaces created by the forces of a megacity and the ridiculous online worlds where we all have to publish. You move in the present tense, and Mada is one resource for your capacity to think, in a media landscape of endless nonsense that most frequently takes the form of the command – how to be (in debt, afraid, grateful).

Mada’s work creates a record for the future, and so whoever comes after us will be able to see how we lived amid capital and ecological breakdown and war. But the creation of this record is also important because of what it does for us now, what it allows us to do, and how it allows us to be: precarious, yes, frequently depressed, sure, dark-humored and occasionally sentimental, definitely. And also better able to take part in something bigger than ourselves, something that makes and remakes us. In the face of power’s determination for it to be otherwise, this matters. You matter.

Yasmin El-Rifae is the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution and a co-organiser of the Palestine Festival of Literature

An Encounter
by Yasmine El Rashidi

A few afternoons ago I was invited to a gathering marking the one-year memorial of a family friend’s passing. It was an improbably rainy Cairo day and the hosts were unsure what the turnout would be. “You have to come,” my friend said to me, “people keep cancelling”.

It had been a difficult week. My mother had undergone major surgery and my life was consumed by nursing, so I was not much in the mood for chitchat and somewhat relieved at the prospect of a sparse get-together.

Yet when I walked into the apartment, in an old Art Deco building some 10 minutes by car from downtown Cairo and Tahrir Square, the place was packed. A mix of university professors, businesspeople, lawyers, and a large ensemble of “party of the couch” Egyptians – named for those who were largely against the revolution of 2011 and spent those thrilling times at home in lament.

I said my hellos and took to an armchair by the fireplace in the entrance hallway, planning for my exit, but a dapper gentleman in a beige suede bomber jacket and shiny brown shoes swiftly sat in the couple chair opposite.

“I know your father,” he said, “And your brother in the UK. Are you still writing?” 

The gentleman, let’s call him B, knew my father from our local sporting club where they both swim, and my father had been a schoolmate of his sisters. He was a businessman, the owner of a major chemical manufacturing plant, and it turned out that he had read most everything I wrote, going as far back as my twenties, when I was a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal.

I fumbled to describe to B why I was writing much less, not like I used to, a bit embarrassed by the fact. “I had a run in with the government. It paralysed me for a while. I’m being extra careful”.

“Better,” he said, nodding, in what I thought was approval. “It’s a gamble”. 

I agreed, “It isn’t worth the risk”.

“No,” he said, before pivoting: “Are you following what’s happening to Lina Atallah and Mada Masr?”

Lina and I have been friends for decades now. Our professional and personal worlds overlap. We share a BFF. I almost worked at Mada myself a few years ago and was close to accepting the post when the government debacle happened. Although I felt self-conscious to admit fear in the face of Lina’s bravery (at the time, she had just been called in for questioning about an investigative article and she stands as the face of Mada through any such troubles), I discussed my hesitation openly with the Mada team, ultimately declining their offer. Rather than making me feel bad, they were graciously understanding and supportive of my decision, suggesting that their door would remain open if anything on my end were to change.

I had seen Lina a couple of nights before the memorial, at a dinner with friends, and as we drove home together, we had talked in detail about her case – what she thought might be helpful in terms of support, what else might be to her detriment.

But I didn’t want to tell B all that. I was more curious about what he had to say. In the years since the revolution, as the economy nosedived and inflation soared, largely a result of our totalitarian political system, many Egyptians who took to Tahrir Square have come to express regret over the revolution.

I hear it often described as the second Naksa (defeat), the first being Egypt’s defeat to Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. This sense of setback and resignation I hear in two distinct settings – on the street among ordinary Egyptians, and in more elite business circles.

I made a quick head-to-toe judgment call and imagined that someone like B would be against the paper. Some people had come to conflate investigative reporting into government abuses as antagonistic not just to the government, but to a coveted stability that had eluded Egypt for a good 10 years after 2011. Being outspoken was considered dissident, activist, and a reminder of the havoc the revolution wreaked.

“I am following,” I replied to him about Lina’s case.

B told me that he checked and read Mada Masr daily when he could, or at the very least several times a week. He depended on their investigative reporting to better understand the political and economic currents of Egypt, which allowed him to make informed decisions about his business. Mada was the only media outlet he “could depend on”, he said, describing it as “top-notch”. He said that nothing “Western” could compare.

This is and has always been the dominion of Mada – not just across politics and the economy, but also the arts – the service it provides, as a truth-telling platform that believes in the power of information. Although I’d been aware of the breadth of Mada’s audience, it had not dawned on me until that afternoon how critically useful, valued, and necessary it was – even to people who might normally have considered it the enemy.

Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer and editor. She lives in Cairo.