She was born Amna Wahby Abou Zahra, a name that inevitably reminds the reader of the mother of the Prophet Mohammed, Amna Bint Wahb. She later tells her son Nour that the name was given to her for the blessings it carries and brings the bearer.
She met and fell in love with Amin Abdallah, whose name is akin to Al-Amin, a name used to refer to the Prophet Mohammed before the revelation of Islam.
Her love for Amin starts the greatest transformation in her life when she walks the path of liberation from her imposed and unconsummated marriage with Mansour Effendi, which took place in the early years of the Free Officers’ coup-turned-revolution in July 1952.
Once with Amin, an idealistic socialist whose manifesto seems to be at odds with the mainstream socialists and communists of his time, Amna is transformed into Mouna and takes on a new identity as a woman who can put behind her the girl who succumbed to female genital mutilation at the hands of a woman with a razor and later suffered from forced defloration at the hands of another woman.
Mouna is opening up to the world and not just to love and sex. She is indulging in her own transformation as she cooks for a man she loves while putting behind her the demon of an obnoxious brother.
However, as Amin is put in one of the jails that gathered the opponents of former President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the early 1960s, Mouna is shaken, not back into Amna but into a new and temporary self – that of Nimo, a woman who succumbs to a half-wanted and half-fulfilling sensuality and whose mind abandons the rhythms of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish’s Ana Haweit for Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas.
In a close to 300-page novel full of intense sentiments, condensed events, and somewhat troubling thoughts, Youssef Rakha has created “The Dissenters,” the tale of two narrators, a mother and a son. It is the story of a woman whose own transformations are akin to those of her country, Egypt, and of her city, Cairo.
Amna’s transformations are not confined to her identity as a woman and a mother. They are more about the transformations of her mind and soul. She flirts with hope and to an extent with politics in the early years of her relationship with Amin. However, it does not take her long after his political arrest for her to decide to be apolitical by choice. She decides to bow to the name of the name she was given and becomes committed to the rituals and demeanor of a good Muslim mother.
This comes with extended prayers, lessons at the Al-Fatah Mosque, and outfits that firmly turn the page on a wardrobe full of miniskirts. It liberates her from an uncertain sense of guilt at her earlier life, but it does not shut the door on the rhythms of Sayyed Darwish. Nor does it divorce her from her francophone side, engrained in her during her years at the Sacré-Cœur School in Heliopolis.
The later return of Amin from prison and the bearing of two children does not bring about a change in her situation. Her children are Abid, who serves in the state security apparatus, and Nour, a journalist who tells his mother’s story to Shimo in a destination of choice. Abid literally means a worshipper, Nour means light, and Shimo is a nickname for Shayma, the sister of the Prophet Mohammed.
It is the 25 January 2011 Revolution that brings Mouna back, if not actually reconciles her with the Amna of her origin and the former Nimo. She abandons the comfort of her house, shabby as it is turning out to be, on Street 9 in Maadi to head to Cairo’s Tahrir Square first to see the end of the 30-year rule of former President Hosni Mubarak and then to see the end of the rule of the country’s first democratically elected civilian president.
However, this is a short-lived resurrection. This time, it is not Amin who goes to jail. It is the Revolution itself that collapses as the country goes backwards in an attempt to rid itself of the Brotherhood government.
This fall is not just the fall of the Revolution. It is also that of the many and mostly unconnected shades of Mouna. She is associated with “the jumpers,” women who chose to jump out of the windows of buildings and put an end to their lives. Why did one of these women, Monica Younis, and 11 others end their lives, and why did the state not allow their stories to be reported? Mouna asks Nour to investigate.
In one of her last acts of survival, Mouna walks in the streets of Cairo in search of answers. But she is surrendering to a demon that keeps haunting her just as the jumpers were haunted by their own demons. Eventually, Mouna loses her faith and energy. She slowly reclines into a forgiving and sombre death in bed.
Nour, who had tried everything to avert the inevitable, is watching her. He finds his place next to her one last time before he takes a path of almost posthumous soul-searching for his own mother and later starts writing letters to Shimo, thus heralding a new life.
In his search to bring Mouna back to life on paper, Nour looks his grief in the eye and the story is finally told. He is finally able to move on while looking at her life in a much larger and maybe more compelling context.
“I reflect on her destiny in the light of the Revolution,” Nour writes to Shimo in his first letter. However, it is not just the 25 January 2011 Revolution that Nour is depicting as he goes to the attic of his mother’s house to learn more about her. It is also the 1952 Revolution that ended the monarchy with the hope of democracy that was soon dashed by the new regime.
It is the political trends of the 1960s and the socio-economic schisms of the 1970s, including troubling moments of sectarian strife, and it is the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. It is the story of a generation of men and women who went through many transformations and who fought many demons on a path that thwarted their hopes when they opted for political activism or religion.
Ultimately, it was not only in the post-2011 Revolution that the jumpers started. They were there long before with women like Doria Chafik, a feminist who defied Nasser and ended up confined before jumping out of a seventh-floor window, and Arwa Saleh, an activist of the 1970s student movement, who killed herself by jumping from the 11th floor.
It is the story of a nation that has often moved from high hopes to great defeats and for which a leader of one kind or another is always in order, maybe out of the need to have something or someone to believe in. But this leader is always capable of defying democracy and Sharia Law combined.
Above everything else, it is the story of those who are born to carry a message, hard and arduous as the road might be and defeated as they often are. It is an eulogy to a life that brings love, pain, and disappointments.
“The Dissenters” is also a walk through the streets of Cairo, with a few close-ups and many wide-shots, at times from one rooftop or another. Some shots are blurred, and some are sharp.
The novel, published in English by the Graywolf Press in 2025, and not yet available in Arabic, is a comprehensive journal through the 25 January Revolution and how it ended.
In interviews, Rakha has said that the Revolution was his point of departure. Later, he developed the book to revolve more around his woman protagonist and included some elements from the life of his own mother.
“The Dissenters” is a story of parallels in the contemporary history of the country, with intersecting timelines. It is the saga (mawal as Nour says) of short-lived days of hope, which are not as recurrent as they were but are certainly still forceful. It adds a major work to the list of novels that aim to depict the country’s transformations through the experiences of female protagonists, like Zat by Sonallah Ibrahim, One day before the Defeat (Qabl Al-Nakssa Beyoum) by Iman Yehiya, or Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal.
Bina Shah, a Pakistani novelist and essayist, perceptively writes that “The Dissenters” is about all the ways that the body is imprisoned or made free, whether by politics, sex, power, love, or death.
The Dissenters is a perfect read on the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the decline of the 2011 Revolution.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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