Earlier this year, while in Pakistan, I visited my village where I share a house with my sister. Built nearly 300 years ago by an ancestor, it's a traditional courtyard house with fountains, frescoes and wooden balconies. It's also next door to a mosque mounted with powerful loudspeakers. Since we were staying the night, I sent a polite request to the mosque's imam. Would he, just this once, just for the dawn prayer, in line with age-old tradition, call the faithful to prayer in his own voice, instead of using the loudspeaker? He obliged. Two days later someone sent an anonymous note to the house. Before you make any such demands again, it read, remember what happened to Salman Taseer.

Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, was assassinated in January by a fanatical member of his own security guard for proposing a review of Pakistan's contentious blasphemy laws. Taseer was a flamboyant figure who made no secret of his liberal views and lifestyle. Ecstatic lawyers showered his murderer with rose petals and mullahs led thousands in street demonstrations in support of the blasphemy law. Some Pakistanis who live in the west and enjoy every one of its hard-won liberties, set up Facebook pages lauding Taseer's murderer as a hero. Middle-class kids, who salivate over Angelina Jolie and dream of a green card, condoned the murder of "an immoral, westernised liberal". Taseer's murder and its aftermath marked a turning point in my relationship with my homeland.

I live in London. I moved here 15 years ago from Lahore, when I married a London-based Pakistani. My London life is full and varied. I have good friends, engrossing work and live in a nice part of town. My children go to good schools, my husband's work is prospering. We live with security and the rule of law. I have a deep affection for Britain because I spent my late teens and university years here. Much of what I am, I owe to my UK education.

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The target of the Egyptian police, that day in November 2015, was the street vendors selling socks, $2 sunglasses and fake jewelry, who clustered under the arcades of the elegant century-old buildings of Heliopolis, a Cairo suburb. Such raids were routine, but these vendors occupied an especially sensitive location. Just 100 yards away is the ornate palace where Egypt’s president, the military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, welcomes foreign dignitaries. As the men hurriedly gathered their goods from mats and doorways, preparing to flee, they had an unlikely assistant: an Italian graduate student named Giulio Regeni.

He arrived in Cairo a few months earlier to conduct research for his doctorate at Cambridge. Raised in a small village near Trieste by a sales manager father and a schoolteacher mother, Regeni, a 28-year-old leftist, was enthralled by the revolutionary spirit of the Arab Spring. In 2011, when demonstrations erupted in Tahrir Square, leading to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, he was finishing a degree in Arabic and politics at Leeds University. He was in Cairo in 2013, working as an intern at a United Nations agency, when a second wave of protests led the military to oust Egypt’s newly elected president, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, and put Sisi in charge. Like many Egyptians who had grown hostile to Morsi’s overreaching government, Regeni approved of this development. ‘‘It’s part of the revolutionary process,’’ he wrote an English friend, Bernard Goyder, in early August. Then, less than two weeks later, Sisi’s security forces killed 800 Morsi supporters in a single day, the worst state-sponsored massacre in Egypt’s history. It was the beginning of a long spiral of repression. Regeni soon left for England, where he started work for Oxford Analytica, a business-research firm.

From afar, Regeni followed Sisi’s government closely. He wrote reports on North Africa, analyzing political and economic trends, and after a year had saved enough money to start on his doctorate in development studies at Cambridge. He decided to focus on Egypt’s independent unions, whose series of unprecedented strikes, starting in 2006, had primed the public for the revolt against Mubarak; now, with the Arab Spring in tatters, Regeni saw the unions as a fragile hope for Egypt’s battered democracy. After 2011 their numbers exploded, multiplying from four to thousands. There were unions for everything: butchers and theater attendants, well diggers and miners, gas-bill collectors and extras in the trashy TV soap operas that played during the holy month of Ramadan. There was even an Independent Trade Union for Dwarfs. Guided by his supervisor, a noted Egyptian academic at Cambridge who had written critically of Sisi, Regeni chose to study the street vendors — young men from distant villages who scratched out a living on the sidewalks of Cairo. Regeni plunged into their world, hoping to assess their union’s potential to drive political and social change.

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