A Revolution Devours Its Children

CAIRO—It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the teeming Cairo neighborhood of Faisal to what locals call " El Sijn "—Arabic for "the prison." There are many in Egypt, but everyone seems to know the prison: Tora Prison, opened in 1908. It has housed a diverse assortment of the country's dissidents, businessmen, Islamists, and statesmen—including the ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for nearly three decades before his regime fell in the uprising that began almost exactly five years ago. Since then, the upheaval hasn't stopped, and it's as much personal as it is collective. The country saw its first-ever democratic elections; another wave of protest over the rule of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president those elections brought to power; a military coup, led by then-Army Chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; and a reinstatement, under now-President Sisi, of the kind of authoritarianism protesters risked their lives to escape five years ago. The crackdown has ensnared liberals and Islamists alike, leaving the prison as a burial chamber for the aspirations of the revolution, in all their wide variety. Nourhan Hefzy has memorized the way there. The route winds through Faisal's trash-strewn maze of narrow streets and past the more… Read full this story

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