In June 1985, the Egyptian Marxist Arwa Salih composed a letter to an unnamed comrade from her self-imposed exile in Ishbiliyya (Seville), a city that she likened to “Egypt’s deep south.” In it, she raged with fire and fury upon the “so-called disillusioned Marxists” of Egypt’s fifties and sixties generation, who had made second careers of commandeering the budding student movement of 1970–73, and with whom her generation had “wasted the most important years of our lives”:

If I were ever to get the chance to help come up with a party platform, I’d fight tooth and nail in order to set one condition for prospective members: a minimum age of 30 and a history of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow like the rest of God’s creatures. Then we’d see who gets to play vanguard over whom . . . On this note, I have to tell you that I’ve developed a sudden and very strange aversion to old people that sometimes borders on physical revulsion. They appear to me to be a kind of calumny on life. I’m reminded of something awful I once heard about a Japanese custom that when people get old, they pack up a very little bit of food, climb up to the top of a mountain and wait for death to take them. I can’t help but think it might be a good idea really.

Salih had been a veteran underground activist, a leader of the student movement of the early 1970s that threatened to topple President Anwar Sadat’s new and widely unpopular regime, an author of several books and translations of Marxist literature, and a former member of the Central Committee of the most radical leftist organization of the time, the Egyptian Workers Communist Party (EWCP).