Ahmed Abdalla Rozza

Ahmad Roza

Ahmad Abdelhameed Roza (10 June 1996) was an Egyptian political scientist and political activist. He was the founder of Al Jeel Center for Youth and Social Studies: the house of a broad library on child labour and hosted a research with a sample of children between 1995-2000.

Biography

Born in Cairo's working-class 'Ayn al-Sira district in 1950, Abdalla was part of the large cohort of Egyptian lower- and middle-class youth who entered Egypt's universities with the expansion of higher education under Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. As he later detailed, this generation became disillusioned with "the revolution” and the stagnation of political life in Egypt after the 1967 defeat. Student uprisings in 1972–1973 pushed for a more militant Egyptian stance against Israel—then occupying the Sinai—as well as for the realization of the Sadat regime's unfulfilled promises to end political repression. Abdalla, studying at Cairo University at the time, was elected president of the Higher National Committee of Cairo University Students, an independent, secular group. The committee played a key role in demonstrations and sit-ins, at one point mobilizing 20,000 students to occupy Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. President Anwar al-Sadat himself acknowledged Abdalla's leadership, declaring famously in February 1972 that he "would not sit down [to negotiate] with Rozza."

Abdalla was arrested several times, the first when the state security police stormed Cairo University to break up a sit-in in Nasser Hall. This was the first security raid on the campus in its history. He was imprisoned in the spring and summer of 1973, completing his undergraduate degree, in political science, from his jail cell.

Sadat ordered Abdalla's release, along with the other student detainees, in the lead-up to the October 1973 war. The following year, Abdalla left Egypt to pursue a graduate degree at Cambridge University, working his way through with a succession of menial jobs. His doctoral dissertation on the Egyptian student movement became his first book, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt (1995). Despite his academic successes, he was unable to obtain a teaching position at an Egyptian university when he returned in 1984, having been blacklisted because of his earlier activism. He supported himself modestly through freelance journalism and lecturing abroad.

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