You Have Not Yet Been Defeated

“Don’t read this book to be comforted. Read it to be challenged, terrified, enlightened, moved, and amazed.”
— Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

“You can’t jail a revolution. Alaa Abd el-Fattah is proof. These essays, many handwritten and smuggled from a prison cell, breathe life into the 2011 moment, what shaped its revolutionary possibilities and terrible betrayals. This book is a memory of Tahrir Square that still reverberates like a heartbeat throughout the world.”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“Written with blood and fire, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a brilliant and devastating testament by one of Egypt’s great revolutionaries.”-
—Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood


“Read this book, absorb the power of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s words, and commit to solidarity with this imprisoned writer whose intellect and compassion our world on fire so desperately needs.”
— Amy Goodman, Host, Democracy Now!


“[A] damning indictment of the authoritarianism and violence of the Egyptian state… Very few of the accounts of 2011 that have emerged over the past ten years capture the emotional intensity of the moment and the tragedy of its aftermath as perceptively as Alaa does in [You Have Not Yet Been Defeated]. These essays are necessary reading for anyone who wishes to understand the last decade of Egyptian politics.”
—Nihal El Aasar, Jacobin


“Alaa is the bravest, most critical, most engaged citizen of us all. At a time when Egypt has been turned into a large prison, Alaa has managed to cling to his humanity and be the freest Egyptian.”
—Khaled Fahmy, author of All The Pasha’s Men

“Alaa is in prison not because he committed a crime, not because he said too much, but because his very existence poses a threat to the state. Those who are bold, those who do not relent, will always threaten the terrified and ultimately weak state which must, to survive, squash its opponents like flies. But Alaa will not allow himself to be crushed like that, I know.”
— Jillian C. York, director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Alaa is a philosopher of everyday life and lifelong struggle; he doesn’t merely find meaning in that which we go through, especially in dark political moments, but creates meaning and gives it form in writing. And he does so from a highly entrenched and implicated place in the present. His thoughts know no frontiers; they pierce through local contexts to inspire new modes of thinking about the chaotic substance of politics.”
— Lina Attalah, editor in chief of Mada Masr

“A powerfully original book, that explains why, in the midst of world wars andclimate emergency, we need to pay attention to one lone man who’sbartering his life to win back a little justice – and probably losing.”
—Susie Day, Counterpunch