How to bury a communist twice

In 2018, the Spanish press ran the story that Pablo Iglesias, leader of the left-wing Podemos movement, and his partner Irene Montero—a fellow leader whom Arabs would later recognize by her Palestinian keffiyeh—had purchased a luxury villa, complete with a garden and pool, in one of Madrid’s wealthier suburbs, funded through a bank loan.

It was the first blow. Others followed, a cascade of missteps that steadily chipped away at the credibility of both Iglesias and the Podemos leadership. Supporters began to drift away; a party that had once seriously vied to form a government was soon reduced to a marginal, symbolic presence in parliament.

Buying a luxury villa with a bank loan is, of course, entirely legal and legitimate—no one can be blamed merely for wanting one. The crisis lay in how violently this purchase clashed with the self-absorbed, high-handed rhetoric that Iglesias and his inner circle had for years weaponized against their opponents. Iglesias had painted a self-portrait that practically cast him as Lenin reborn, implying that he and his comrades were accomplishing what no one in the Spanish left had ever dared. This was compounded by their previously “uncompromising” stance against the very banking system used to finance mortgages.

Lenin does not live in a gated community for the rich. One could almost hear Iglesias saying exactly that in his speeches. The “Lenin” in question, of course, was Iglesias himself—constantly railing against the coddled lives of politicians, naming and shaming them for their luxury while ordinary people endured crushing austerity. He boasted of his working-class roots, his lower-middle-class family, riding the subway with the public, mingling in the streets and cafés. This abrupt class ascent was a shock, throwing the doors wide open for critics to tear him apart as a fraud and a poseur.

Crossing class lines

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of the communist leader and lawyer Ahmed Nabil El-Hilali, the Islamist lawyer Montasser El-Zayat wrote a piece asking where Hilali’s disciples—those who would defend their Islamist adversaries just as he once did—were among today’s leftist lawyers. This set off a predictable debate over Hilali’s legacy, lamenting how the left was no longer “Hilali-ist” and prompting defensive rebuttals to El-Zayat, as well as sharp reminders of the Islamist movement’s own authoritarian history, which had alienated so many, leftist lawyers included.

The son of Ahmad Naguib El-Hilali Pasha, the last Prime Minister before the 1952 coup, turned his back on his father, his class, and their entire political order

What is striking now is how El-Hilali is invoked almost exclusively through a very specific lens: as a human rights lawyer first, and only secondarily as a leftist who defended his ideological opponents. Yet for those of us who addressed him outside our underground organization, the Egyptian Socialist People’s Party, as “Mister Nabil,”and within it as “Comrade Bashir,” the core of the man was simple: he was a communist first and foremost, and a lawyer second.

It is impossible to strip El-Hilali of the communist marrow that defined his entire life, a consistency that places him at the polar opposite of a bourgeois Lenin like Pablo Iglesias. Unlike Iglesias, El-Hilali was born with a silver spoon in his mouth; no one would have begrudged him choosing a comfortable, elegant life alongside a fashionable Marxist intellectualism. God knows there is no shortage of such figures.

Living in genuine solidarity with ordinary people was the counter-narrative that Mr. Nabil embodied every single day. The son of Ahmad Naguib Pasha El-Hilali—the last Prime Minister before the July 1952 coup—rebelled in his youth, against his father, his class, and against the entire political regime.

He committed himself to the underground communist movement in the early 1940s, choosing to live exactly like the people he championed. Right up to his death, he maintained the modest lifestyle of a mid-tier lawyer and a militant cadre, remaining deeply embedded in the working-class industrial belts of Helwan, Shubra El-Kheima, El-Mahalla, and Kafr El-Dawwar.

Having walked away so early from his family’s aristocratic privilege and the vast advantages it offered, he developed a rare grace toward human frailty and impulse. He kept warm terms with everyone, remaining deeply modest and entirely above personal vitriol. He never shamed individuals or launched ad hominem attacks; his target was always policy, and his personal integrity never came at the cost of his principles. Even his quick wit and ever-present humor were extensions of this warmth, cementing a cross-generational charisma that disarmed friends and foes alike.

I got to know Mr. Nabil on many levels and in many contexts over the years. I got my first glimpse of him when I was still a child in the early 1980s, on a dim street corner in Nasr City, arriving at our house for a private meeting with my father whose political gravity I could only guess at. Later, at my father’s side, I saw him again: first in his office, and then in a grand hall, packed with people, during an Egyptian opposition conference in 1986 or 1987.

Despite not representing any legally recognized party, El-Hilali was universally recognized as the towering symbol of the Egyptian—and arguably Arab—left, holding an undisputed claim to the opposition’s podiums. The atmosphere at that conference was thick with tension.

A rowdy contingent of university students, impatient with the legalistic speakers, clamored for just two men. First was the Nasserist firebrand Farid Abdel-Karim, their chants cutting through the speeches: “We want to hear the voice of Farid!” Then, capitalizing on the deliberate, heavy pauses El-Hilali left between his paragraphs, they roared: “Speak, Nabil, speak out / Let the people learn from you. Speak, Hilali, teach us / Reactionism is making our lives hell.”

In those days, the underground communist organization founded by “Comrade Bashir” alongside Youssef Darwish, Michel Kamel, and Taha Saad Othman was taking its tentative first steps, splitting from the line of Rifaat Al-Said. Al-Said, who dominated the official Egyptian Communist Party, was steering it toward appeasement of the regime under various pretexts—chiefly that Mubarak’s presidency was a national institution requiring critical support.

This factional friction reverberated through the hall. Among those shouting students was the late Sayyed Fathi, then a university student belonging to the new underground cell and its most formidable campus organizer.

Justice through a communist prism

With time, the immediate friction eased. Leftists outside Rifaat Al-Said’s faction in the Communist Party and Tagammu began the slow work of dialogue, coordination, and joint struggle. The architects of this convergence were Mr. Nabil and the late “Uncle” Youssef Darwish—Al-Zamil “Hani” in the Egyptian Socialist People’s Party.

One product of this effort was the journal Al-Badeel, founded in the early nineties by Abdel-Ghaffar Shokr alongside El-Hilali. Its editorial board, which gathered regularly in El-Hilali’s office, brought together representatives from every corner of the independent communist left.

This essay is not a personal memoir of my relationship with El-Hilali; it is an open critique of the sanitized, “NGO-ized” manner in which he is being commemorated. His entire post-1960s trajectory—most of which he spent behind bars—was a direct, uncompromised continuation of his class-conscious communist commitment forged in the 1940s, irrespective of the shifting regimes, front organizations, or party names he operated under.

The great lawyer welcomed them all as equals, his office was their home. Not because he was a rights lawyer, but because he was a communist

Nabil El-Hilali’s office in Bab Al-Louq—originally his father’s, then shared with fellow leftist lawyers(*)—operated as the headquarters of an informal communist tribunal. It prioritized the defense of workers, peasants, and political dissidents, deploying a legal methodology that was explicitly inseparable from social and political struggle. It bore no resemblance to the modern human rights industry, which insists on a sterile, apolitical abstraction; this political approach is precisely what animated Mr. Nabil’s courtroom arguments.

In the late eighties and early nineties, law students and novice leftist lawyers were always drifting through the office, welcomed without hesitation, while in the small back room, a hasty, urgent underground organizational meeting might quietly be taking place. In the foyer, sat Safaa Zaki Murad’s desk; in the adjacent room sat Sayyed Abu Zeid; in a third was Rahma Rifaat, representing the radical labor movement.

The great lawyer treated everyone as an equal, making them feel his office was their home. Not because he was a rights lawyer, but because he was a communist. Even though he was one of the key founders of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and, before that, the Liberties Committee of the Lawyers Syndicate, he took an uncompromising stand against the foreign funding that flooded the human rights and civil society NGOs established by leftists in the 1990s.

This issue sparked fierce, public debate within leftist circles at the time. It is a crucial detail to remember, lest contemporary readers mistake him for the godfather of the current NGO landscape. Long before today’s model emerged, Nabil El-Hilali—following in the footsteps of Youssef Darwish and others—built what we might call a class-based liberties movement.

Its lineage stretched back to the labor and peasant struggles of the 1930s and 40s, and its methodology revolved around weaponizing the law and civil liberties from an explicitly class-conscious, communist perspective.

His project was never just a generic defense of “all prisoners of conscience”—a shallow formulation that reduces him to a toothless “leftist advocate.” Indeed, his relationship with political Islam was itself a point of fierce contention within the communist movement and the People’s Party. One faction rejected any cooperation with either the Islamists or the state, while Mr. Nabil, for tactical political reasons rather than abstract human rights principles, argued that cooperation was possible on specific fronts. Crucially, both factions remained fiercely hostile to Rifaat Al-Said’s support for the Mubarak regime’s brutal suppression of the Islamists.

From the 1970s onward, Mr. Nabil shuttled between his home in Nasr City, his downtown office, and various courts and prosecution chambers. That was his public face. But there were other, invisible movements—the underground party cells and organizational meetings that continued uninterrupted for over sixty years, surviving even the long prison terms of its cadres. And before any office or courtroom, his true home was Shubra El-Kheima and Helwan, among the industrial workers, the very class whose historical interests he prioritized above all else.

This was the shared ground that united him with those who stood alongside him in the latter half of his life, after their release from Nasser’s camps: Zaki Murad, Youssef Darwish, the writer Michel Kamel, and the labor leader Taha Saad Othman. Othman had abandoned the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s to join the communists, famously walking into the home of his Jewish comrade and lawyer, Youssef Darwish, to shave off his beard—a beautifully symbolic declaration of his new allegiance.

Rejecting Property

His class and communist alignment dictated his path and set his compass. This is precisely why, for example, he did not defend the Islamists who assassinated Farag Foda. He did not defend Islamists indiscriminately, as Montasser El-Zayat’s nostalgic narrative implies.

His choice of cases was always highly principled; during the 1990s, when the Mubarak regime began hauling Islamists before military tribunals, he systematically refused to defend civilians in those venues, aiming to deny the military court system any veneer of legitimacy.

In 1993, during the forced-divorce lawsuit brought against Dr. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Dr. Ibtihal Younis, the defense committee met at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights in Al-Manial. To dismantle the charge of apostasy, Abu Zayd proposed appearing in court to publicly recite the two declarations of faith (the Shahada). Several faces in the room lit up with excitement, thinking they had found the clever loophole that would collapse the prosecution’s case.

Mr. Nabil shut down that enthusiasm instantly. Yet he did so with a gentle smile and a quiet reasoning that easily won over Abu Zayd—who, like El-Hilali, believed fiercely in absolute freedom. El-Hilali pointed out that such a stunt would only embolden the Islamists to blackmail the left, “dragging us all into court to recite our faith on demand, which is something we must never tolerate.”

Just as he, as a communist, would never have countenanced living in a luxury villa, he equally refused to bargain away his own intellectual freedom or that of others, whether before the autocracy of the state or the blackmail of the Islamists.

The political and class alignment of Comrade Bashir—wholly free of pretense, condescension, or moral grandstanding—was his defining trait. His ideological and moral convictions dictated a lifetime rejection of private property and a strict refusal to profit from the struggles of workers, the poor, or cases of free expression and liberty.

It is this rare, unyielding consistency that earned him the moniker “The Saint of the Left.” We must salvage and interrogate his legacy far outside the confines of the modern human rights movement—a movement we may respect and need, but one that is entirely insufficient to hold a figure of his scale.