If we measured your might
it wouldn’t hold a candle
to a constitution.
We shed no tears for Ben Ali,
nor any for his reign.
It was nothing more than a moment
in time for us,
historical
and dictatorial,
a system of oppression,
an era of autocracy.
Mohammed Al-Ajami was a student at Cairo University when he wrote several poems criticizing the Arab governments’ response to the Arab Spring, including one directed at the Emir of Qatar, his home country, and another at the government of Tunisia (as seen above). Videos of Al-Ajami reciting the poems were widely circulated on YouTube, going viral in the Arab world.
On November 16, 2011, after he returned to Qatar from Egypt, Mohammed was arrested by state security forces and charged with challenging “by any public means the exercise by the Emir of his rights or authorities or criticizes him,” and instigating “by public means to overthrow the regime of the country.” A year later he was sentenced to life in prison, which was eventually commuted to 15 years.
In February 2016, Freedom Now partnered with organizations, including English PEN, Amnesty International, and ADHRB to collect petitions from thousands of people and to organize coordinated protests in London and Washington, DC at the Qatari embassies. In the same month, we organized students from Cornell University, which has a satellite campus in Qatar, to issue an open letter to the university’s acting president about the case.
A few weeks after our coordinated action the Emir of Qatar pardoned Mohammad. Today he lives in Dubai with his family.