How Guilt Is Made

Reading 'Abolish Criminology' through Egypt

In February 1996, an Alexandrian man named Mohamed Badr Eddin Gomaa walked into Montaza police station to report his missing child, Gihad. Months later, the police produced a body, declared it the girl’s, and moved swiftly to manufacture closure by manufacturing guilt. Gomaa was seized from his home, detained for weeks, threatened through his family, and tortured into confession. The case collapsed only because reality intervened: Gihad reappeared alive, and Gomaa was cleared in 1998. What remained intact was not justice, but a system that had demonstrated how little it needed truth in order to function.

The lesson of that story is not simply that torture exists. It is that institutions organized around coercion become structurally uninterested in knowing. Investigation, verification, and forensic labor give way to shortcuts. Confession replaces evidence. Violence substitutes for competence. Over time, the system adapts to its own worst habits, normalizing them as efficiency. The result is not a malfunctioning justice apparatus, but one working as designed, capable of producing “criminals” on demand.

My starting point is not geographical but analytical. It belongs to an Egyptian archive of policing, torture, and manufactured guilt that continues to travel, shaping how state power is recognized, justified, and contested well beyond its original setting. Read through that archive, Abolish Criminology feels not only timely, but necessary.

Edited by Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Jason M. Williams, and Michael J. Coyle, Abolish Criminology does not confine itself to condemning police abuse, mass incarceration, or courtroom injustice. It goes further upstream. Its target is criminology itself: the discipline that supplies the categories, narratives, and “common sense” through which scenes like Montaza are rendered legible, defensible, and ultimately forgettable.