Sarah Hegazi

Sarah Hegazi – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Sarah Hegazi (1989–2020), Egyptian LGBTQ+ activist and socialist, risked her life for freedom and equality. Explore her biography, activism, legacy, and inspiring words.

Introduction

Sarah Hegazi was a courageous Egyptian LGBTQ+ activist, socialist thinker, and writer whose life and death captured global attention. Though she died young, her bold stand in the face of repression made her a symbol of resistance, dignity, and the struggle for human rights in the Middle East and beyond. Her story reminds us how deeply personal the fight for freedom can be—how one person’s gesture can echo across continents.

Born in 1989 in Egypt and passing in 2020 in exile, Hegazi’s journey was shaped by family, politics, identity, trauma, and hope. She challenged not only state violence but also social taboos, in a region where LGBTQ+ rights are often suppressed. Today, she is commemorated not just as a martyr but as a voice urging the world to listen, reflect, and act.

Early Life and Family

Sarah Hegazi was born on 1 October 1989 in Egypt, into a conservative, middle-class family. She was the eldest of four siblings, a role that came with responsibility after their father—who taught science in high school—passed away. In her youth, she wore the hijab, reflecting the religious and cultural expectations of her upbringing. Over time, as she came to terms with her own inner identity, she would remove it.

Her home environment was, by many accounts, traditional and conservative—so her later openness about being lesbian and her critique of social norms carried personal risk. The family’s dynamics, and the burden of loss and expectations, colored her early emotional world.

Youth and Education

Hegazi’s formal education began with a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from Thebas Academy in 2010. Later, she studied through the American University in Cairo’s Continuing Education Center, completing that in 2016.

Beyond those degrees, she pursued numerous online certificates and courses in social justice, diversity, violence studies, feminist theory, and research methods, through institutions like Columbia University, UCSC, SOAS, University of Pittsburgh, and Emory. These studies reflect her deep intellectual curiosity and a desire to ground her activism in theory and solidarity.

Her evolving identity—socialist, feminist, queer—was nurtured by both lived experience and academic inquiry. She embraced political and gender-critical thought alongside her activism.

Career and Activism

First Acts of Resistance & Political Views

Sarah Hegazi identified publicly as a communist and supported the Bread and Freedom Party in Egypt. After her exile, she joined the Spring Socialist Network in Canada. She was also vocally critical of the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whom she described as “the most oppressive and violent dictator in our modern history” in her writings.

She believed that the Egyptian revolution of 2011 had been left incomplete—with many revolutionaries ending up dead, imprisoned, or exiled—and that class struggle remained central to political transformation. She theorized that the old regime would resort to sacrificing “important icons” to stay in power.

The 2017 Concert and Arrest

Hegazi’s most well-known act of activism was at the Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo on 22 September 2017. At that concert, she publicly waved a rainbow flag—a bold gesture of solidarity with LGBTQ+ identities in a highly repressive environment.

That act led to her arrest along with dozens of others. She was charged under vague laws targeting “immorality or debauchery.”

Imprisonment, Torture & Aftermath

During her imprisonment—reported to be about three months—she endured physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, including threats, blindfolding, torture, and assaults by other prisoners under instigation. After her release in January 2018, she was fined (~1,000 Egyptian pounds) and released on bail.

These traumas left deeply damaging psychological effects: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, panic attacks, and debilitating loneliness.

Fearing further persecution, Hegazi sought asylum in Canada in 2018. She lost her mother to cancer shortly after leaving Egypt—a further blow of grief and dislocation.

In exile, she continued her activism, expressed through writing, public reflection, and online presence—though exile also magnified isolation and trauma.

Historical Milestones & Context

Understanding Sarah Hegazi’s life requires seeing it against the backdrop of Egypt’s repressiveness toward speech, gender, and sexuality.

• In Egypt, homosexuality is not explicitly criminalized, but state authorities interpret and enforce laws (e.g. “debauchery” laws) in a way that arrests LGBTQ+ individuals.

• After the 2017 concert crackdown, Egyptian parliamentarians proposed laws to jail homosexual acts up to three to five years—even though the bills did not explicitly mention homosexuality, they referenced “immorality.”

• The arrests following the concert represented one of the most visible government crackdowns on public expression of queerness in Egypt’s recent memory.

• Hegazi’s case quickly became symbolic: she was often described as the only queer woman among the 57 detained that night.

• Her death, in turn, sparked regional and global conversations about the precarity of LGBTQ+ life in Muslim-majority countries, the role of exile, and the weight of social trauma.

Her life and death are deeply intertwined with the politics of dissent, sexuality, exile, memory, and trauma in the modern Middle East.

Legacy and Influence

Even though her life was short, Sarah Hegazi’s legacy has been considerable, especially in queer activism and memory work.

• Her funeral in Canada was held in a rainbow-colored coffin, and her body was laid to rest at St. John’s Dixie Cemetery on 22 June 2020.

• Across the world, activists held vigil events, murals, and tributes in New York, London, Amsterdam, Beirut, and beyond.

• Her story has inspired documentaries, such as Nicole Teeny’s “Sarah Hegazi Documentary,” which blends animation and archival narrative.

• In 2023, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy inaugurated a fellowship in her name.

• Memory activism continues: her name is invoked in queer activism across the Arab world; murals and street art honoring her have been painted (and sometimes erased).

• In Arab discourse, her death has opened debates on religion, identity, queer ethics, and whether one can remain queer and Muslim in oppressive societies.

Her legacy is not static—she lives on in conversations, struggle, and the lives that she emboldened.

Personality and Talents

Sarah Hegazi’s activism was rooted in sensitivity, intellectual rigor, and emotional hunger. She was not a polished politician but a vulnerable human being whose pain and utopia intertwined.

• She described herself on social media (in some versions) as “super communist, super gay, super feminist.”

• She had poetic sensibilities and often expressed herself in short but potent lines—her writing reminds readers of loss, longing, and the urgent need for justice.

• Her capacity to tolerate anguish, to survive torment, yet still speak publicly reflects both bravery and fragility.

• She understood politicization as deeply personal—her activism was born as much from intimate suffering as from ideology.

• She was deeply aware of isolation, and sometimes painfully candid about her loneliness in exile.

In her final note, she asked for forgiveness and acknowledged failure—not as defeat but as human truth.

Famous Quotes of Sarah Hegazi

Here are some of her most poignant, haunting words—small fragments that carry deep weight:

“All I dream of is to be able to leave Egypt. If I found out I was banned from traveling, I won’t let them imprison me.”
“Home is not land and borders. It’s about people you love.”
“Here in Canada, I haven’t people, I haven’t family, I haven’t friends. So I’m not happy here.”
“The sky is more beautiful than earth, and I want the sky, not earth.”
“Prison killed me. It destroyed me.”

One last stanza (from a note circulated after her death) reads (translated):

“To my siblings – I tried to survive and I failed, forgive me. To my friends – the experience was harsh and I am too weak to resist it, forgive me. To the world – you were cruel to a great extent, but I forgive you.”

These words echo not only despair but deep introspection and sorrow.

Lessons from Sarah Hegazi

From Sarah’s life emerge powerful lessons—not sentimental, but urgent and unsettling.

1. Visibility can be a powerful act
   Even a simple gesture—raising a rainbow flag—can challenge entrenched power. But such visibility comes at cost, especially in repressive societies.

2. Trauma does not cease at borders
   Exile may rescue the body, but it cannot immediately cure the mind. Sarah’s struggle with PTSD and isolation shows how repression extends beyond prison walls.

3. Liberation is collective
   Sarah’s politics insisted that battles over identity must intersect with class, religion, and revolution. True justice cannot be piecemeal.

4. Compassion in politics
   Her ask for forgiveness is not weakness but radical humility. She reminds us that wounded human beings drive movements, not abstract heroes.

5. Memory is a battlefield
   The erasure of her Arabic Wikipedia page, the removal of murals—these are acts of silencing. Honoring her means insisting on memory, public space, and storytelling.

6. Hope persists even in despair
   She once said she felt most alive in revolution. Her fight remains a reminder that even when hope seems impossible, people still struggle for light.

Conclusion

Sarah Hegazi’s life was brief but blistering with meaning. She faced the impossible—speaking queer truth in a world built to repress it. Yet she left behind more than sorrow: she left a call. Her words, her pain, her radical vision still echo.

Her legacy is not preserved in monuments alone, but in the acts of those who refuse silence, who demand dignity, who build queer solidarities across borders. May her story push us to listen, to learn, to defend voices that power wants buried.