Well-known Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has written a heartbreaking letter to his daughter, Ola, who has been held in solitary confinement in an Egyptian prison for a year. The respected scholar said that Ola is suffering a slow death in captivity.

Sheikh Al-Qaradawi pointed out that his daughter has spent a whole year in solitary confinement in one of the worst prisons in the world. “During this time, Ola has been treated extremely badly and been deprived of her most basic rights,” he explained. “The authorities have not ceased to insult and hurt her.”

He noted that the only reason for her imprisonment is because she is his daughter and has Qatari nationality. “A year has passed and we are waiting for a silent conscience to move, or a sleeping conscience to wake up. A year has passed while she is away from her home, from her children, from her grandchildren, from her father and from her brothers and sisters, in a narrow solitary confinement cell without the slightest rights.”

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The Sheikh accused the Egyptian authorities of using his daughter as a “weak point” to attack him and Qatar. Ola was arrested with her husband, Hossam Khalaf, in early July last year. She is being held in Al-Qanater Women’s Prison. According to Amnesty International, the way that she is being treated amounts to torture.

On Tuesday, Ola Qaradawi began a hunger strike to “end her torture, slow death and change her tragic imprisonment,” her lawyer revealed after the Giza Criminal Court decided to renew her detention for another 45 days.

“This is how innocent people in Egypt are led into prison and are thrown into their darkness,” Sheikh Al-Qaradawi wrote to Ola. “If appeals work, my daughter, I would have appealed to them, but they are hard-hearted, with no mercy in their hearts.” He concluded by calling on free people around the world to save his daughter and the tens of thousands of others who are unjustly imprisoned in Egypt.