Laila Soueif

Laila Soueif (; born 1956) is an Egyptian-British human and women's rights activist and a professor of mathematics at Cairo University. She is the widow of Ahmed Seif El-Islam, and she is mother of activists: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Sanaa Seif, and Mona Seif. Her sister is the novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

Early life and education Laila Soueif was born in London, England, in 1956, the daughter of a university professors. She went to her first political protest in 1972 in Cairo's Tahrir Square, when she was just 16.

She is the founder of the 9 March Professors' Movement for Universities Independence. On 30 September 2024, after Egyptian authorities did not release her son at the end of his sentence on 29 September 2024, but instead pushed the release date to 2027, the 68-year-old Laila went on a hunger strike from the day her son completed his sentence, to demand his release, asking the Egyptian and British governments to respect their own laws and obligations by holding near-weekly protests outside the UK government's Foreign Office in Westminster, calling on the UK government to do more to secure her son's release, chalking on the pavement the number of days of Alaa Abd El-Fattah's illegal imprisonment. She has been surviving on water, rehydration salts, and sugarless tea and coffee, and spends an hour each day outside 10 Downing Street. She was joined in mid-January 2025 by Australian journalist Peter Greste, who had been imprisoned in Egypt's Tora prison with Abd El-Fattah in 2013, for a 21-day hunger strike. Her family urged UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to intervene and secure her son's release. Stopping taking the 300-calorie supplements she had been consuming for three months on a partial hunger, Soueif announced on 20 May that she had resumed her near-total hunger strike and her daily one-hour vigil outside Downing Street urging the UK government to do more to make her son's release a priority in relations with Egypt. In June 2025, it was confirmed that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had been attempting to contact Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, but that Sisi had not returned their calls.

On 22 September 2025, Abd El-Fattah was freed from prison, having been pardoned along with five other prisoners by President Sisi.

Personal life Soueif met her future husband, Ahmed Seif El-Islam, in the mid-1970s while at Cairo University, where he was already the "leader of an underground communist student cell calling for revolution".

Owing to her birth in the United Kingdom, Soueif holds both Egyptian and British citizenship.