The indignity of life in Sisi's prisons

Imagine, for a second, that you are safe in your bedroom. Look at your bed and your comfortable mattress. Look at your bookcase and its contents. Contemplate your neat clothes and personal belongings; your favourite scent, your laptop or tablet, music collection, your mobile phone.

Then close your eyes and imagine you are in Egypt, and locked in a prison cell. Perhaps you were arrested for protesting against a law that makes protest illegal. Perhaps you said something on Twitter that the authorities didn't like. Perhaps your political views were recently branded "terrorist" by the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The room in which you stand is about the same size as your bedroom. But this room contains 15-20 other people.

The floor is covered with blankets, which you sleep on and in. You and your cellmates sleep in shifts, because there is not enough space to sleep at the same time.

You will stand for a few hours, sit for a few and sleep for a few. When you do sleep, you will not extend your legs or sleep on your back, you will sleep on your side - this position is called "the sword" - to ensure that others can also sleep in the same position. Faces will be stuck together, breath mixing and bodies overlapping.

The floor is covered with blankets, which you sleep on and in. You and your cellmates sleep in shifts, because there is not enough space.

At the far end of the room there is a tiny hole of a window covered in wire, and on the walls of the room there is nothing but a few nails hammered in, on which plastic bags containing belongings and food brought in by family and friends.

Also at the end of the room is a wall covered by a sheet and behind the sheet there is a hole in the ground with a tap sticking out of the wall six inches above the hole.

They call this a bathroom, and if you are lucky, you will sit and sleep away from this wall so as to not endure the smell of human waste and see what goes on behind the sheet that provides no privacy whatsoever.

Everyone in the room is a smoker, and here I do not only mean cigarettes. There is a thick cloud of cigarette and hashish smoke that floats in the room 24 hours a day.

You will sit on the floor next to a big bag of rubbish containing the food leftovers. Flies, cockroaches and mosquitoes will surround the bag and you will turn away because you certainly cannot cope with filth, only to see the blanket on the floor, which is where you will sleep, covered in food residue, cigarette butts, dust and small insects.

You will now sit in a corner and battle with memories and images in your head. You are now cut off from the world.

You will wonder in anguish: Do the people outside know anything about my suffering? Do they remember me? Do you talk about me?

You do not know what to do. You want scream and cry at your hopeless fate. You are sitting in a despicable cell that even pigs wont live in, with drug dealers, robbers and thugs, for someone to come up to you and say "give me 50 or a 100 Egyptian pounds to be allowed to sleep" or "show me the watch in your hand, I like it, I’m going to keep it".

You are allowed to see sunlight and the outside world once every couple of weeks through the window of the prison transfer vehicle that takes you to the prosecutor.

The jailer will wake you up at 5am, and you will feel relief to finally be able to see your loved ones who are waiting for you. You are handcuffed to another inmate and pushed into the transfer vehicle to find that there is not space for you to sit due to the large numbers on people in the vehicle.

Once at the courthouse, you will sit in a cell much worse than the one you were in, that is no larger than three-square meters with a huge number of accused.

You are not allowed to go to the toilet, and no one listens to you, and soon you will be wishing and praying to God to save you from this nightmare and return you to your original cell.

Why me? What crime have I committed? Is my love for my country and my desire for it to be better a crime?

You will spend the whole day waiting to be seen by the prosecutor only to be surprised that they have renewed your detention for another stint, and thus you will return carrying all the weight of the world on your shoulders.

You will ask yourself questions that do not have answers. Why me? What crime have I committed to be in the company of drug dealers, robbers and criminals? Is my love for my country and my desire for it to be better a crime?

You will remember 25 January and your chants for bread, freedom, social justice and human dignity. Human dignity? There isn't a shred to be found in Sisi's Egypt.

This is an edited translation of the original Arabic.