“It’s been five years since we’ve toppled Mubarak and we’re back to square one,” Nourhan says. At 26, Ahmed was one of Egypt’s most prominent liberal activists, and remains a living symbol of the revolution: once vibrant and triumphant on Cairo’s streets, now languid and silenced behind bars. The young couple used to talk for hours about their plans to open a bookstore, maybe even start a publishing house dedicated to fostering freedom and democracy in a country with a severe deficit of both. Now their conversations are limited to a hurried, supervised 20 minutes every other week.

“It is worse than square one,” corrects Ahmed’s mother Fathia, who often accompanies her daughter-in-law on visits to El Sijn. For her, the journey to the prison evokes a more-distant past, after her father and almost all her male relatives were arrested decades ago for being members of the then-banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. The organization, whose political party was briefly in charge of Egypt’s government following Morsi’s ascent to the presidency, has once again been banned. But Fathia never thought her son—a staunch critic of the very group she and her husband have dedicated their lives to—would also end up behind bars.

Amnesty International and other human-rights groups have called Sisi’s crackdown unprecedented. Security forces have targeted Morsi’s supporters and accused the Brotherhood of coordinating with far more radical Islamist groups that have killed hundreds of police and soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula, including one that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014. The Brotherhood denies any affiliation. Egypt’s Ministry of Interior has reported that 11,877 people were arrested on terrorism charges between January and September 2015, though it has released no updated numbers since.

But the state’s tentacles have spread to strangle any dissent. A protest law passed in November 2013 has become, as Amnesty International describes it, “a fast track” to prison. According to the most recent data available from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, since Morsi’s ouster 41,000 people had been arrested, charged, or indicted with a criminal offence as of May 2014.

“If you’re not with the military regime, you’re a terrorist. But once you lift the terrorist title you see people you know ... your son, your husband, the grocer down the street ... everyone,” Fathia says. “The country is divided. ... No one knows what is next.”

The repression has been intensifying ahead of the fifth anniversary of the revolt’s beginning on January 25; security forces have recently arrested activists and shut down cultural spaces, including a popular art gallery—one of the few bastions of creative community—in downtown Cairo.

“We are now facing the worst, most oppressive time in modern Egyptian history,” says Gamal Eid, a leading Egyptian human-rights lawyer and activist. “[T]he freedom of those behind bars is our own freedom.”