Mohamed Fahmy: Reflections on prison, press freedom and the protection of Canadians abroad
With the release of his new book, Fahmy speaks to OpenCanada on the many shades of the word ‘terrorist,’ how Al Jazeera kept him in the dark and why he is calling for a ‘Protection Charter’ for Canadians abroad.
It might surprise some to learn that Mohamed Fahmy, the 42-year-old Egyptian-Canadian journalist whose imprisonment became a cause célèbre for media colleagues, human rights workers and press freedom advocates around the globe, wasn’t the first in his family to end up behind bars.
When Fahmy was a teenager, his father was arrested for writing articles and petitions protesting the government of Hosni Mubarak. “I visited him in prison,” Fahmy recalls, “so I have always had this upbringing of questioning the authority of the country.”
After years spent reporting from abroad, Fahmy found himself back in Cairo in January of 2011, electrified by the growing anti-government protests in Tahrir Square aimed at the removal of the very same leader his father had railed against.
Fahmy threw himself into covering the fall of the Mubarak government, the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent coup against Morsi, for “three years, non-stop, seven days a week.”
But on Dec. 29, 2013 – three months after taking on the job of Cairo bureau chief for Al Jazeera English – Fahmy and his colleagues Peter Greste and Mohamed Baher were arrested at the city’s Marriott Hotel and charged with being “pro-Muslim Brotherhood terrorists,” fabricating the news and undermining the security of the state.
Fahmy’s new book, The Marriott Cell – An Epic Journey from Cairo’s Scorpion Prison to Freedom, co-written by journalist Carol Shaben, is Fahmy’s account of his Arab Spring coverage, the politics at work behind his arrest, and the forces bolstering the #FreeAJStaff campaign that led to his eventual pardon on Sept. 23, 2015.
Continue reading at OpenCanada.org