Demoralized by the failure of the 1977 Bread Intifada, and facing an escalating campaign of purges against leftists in the universities and civil service, thousands of Egyptian communists and radical nationalists left the country and sought refuge in Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen.
Four months after my birth in 1977, my family relocated to Yemen, where we resided for two years. My father accepted a teaching position at Sana’a University. We were part of a burgeoning community of Egyptian expatriate families, seen in the video below, predominantly of leftist dissidents who fell out with Anwar el-Sadat.