Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, and a member of MESH. His new is book is The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.

From Joshua Muravchik

When I would tell people that I was writing a book about Middle Eastern democrats, the reaction was invariably the same: “That will be a short book.” This jibe expressed the common knowledge that the region remains stubbornly autocratic.

The fact that there is precious little democracy in the Middle East does not mean, however, that there are no democrats. Surveys show that the vast majority say they want democracy, although it is uncertain what they mean. Perhaps more important, there are also individuals whose lives revolve around making their countries more free and democratic, and who have proven they understand these ideas well. We know little about them because their work is peaceful and incremental and overshadowed by the shocking deeds and pronouncements of tyrants, terrorists, and religious fanatics.

I have profiled seven of them, six Arabs and an Iranian. In addition to illuminating their goals and activities, I have attempted to sketch a full biography in the hope of understanding how they came to be who they are.

Each of them was raised under an authoritarian regime in a society hidebound in its customs. Each belonged to a religious tradition that prized memorization over debate; each attended schools that stressed obedience and rote recitation. They learned that personal desires may have little effect on one’s choices in life; that family connections may determine how much justice can be expected; that that dissent can consist of as little as a complaint and be punishable by as much as death; and that power is seized or retained through brutality. In such societies, acquiescence is the key to longevity.

How did they free their minds and become different from most around them? For some the answer lay in exposure to the West. For others the personal became political. Both women in the group saw their mother’s life blighted by polygamy. Some experienced religious or class persecution or watched their parents persecuted. Some witnessed raw brutality and were revolted. One might have been content to be a poet if the authorities had tolerated that.

Each of these seven has paid a heavy price. Four have been imprisoned, and four have received death threats. Three have had loved ones menaced or penalized. Two have been forced into exile. One has seen his children murdered. All have sacrificed material well-being. In addition to physical bravery, each has displayed moral courage to march to their own drummer in societies that prize loyalty, not individualism. Their stories are inspiring and absorbing.

These are the seven:

• Wajeha al-Huwaider, briefly a columnist for the leading Saudi newspaper al-Watan, was banned for her searing polemics against male supremacy. She is the leader of the movement for the right of women to drive in Saudi Arabia and a group that puts Saudi women (faces concealed) on YouTube recounting their mistreatment.
• Mithal al-Alusi, once a leader of the youth movement of the Iraqi Baath Party, split with the party over its brutality and lived two decades in exile. In 2004, after returning to liberated Iraq, he became the first prominent Iraqi to visit Israel, provoking several attempts on his life. In one, his two sons perished. In 2008, Alusi’s fourth trip to Israel led to the lifting of his parliamentary immunity and an indictment for a capital crime, but in a landmark ruling the Iraqi court overturned these actions.
• Mohsen Sazegara was a press attaché to Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris and accompanied Khomeini back to Tehran in 1978 for the revolution’s final triumph. While serving in several high positions in the clerical regime, Sazegara grew increasingly disillusioned by it, becoming one of its most effective opponents, enduring four arrests before being forced into exile in 2004.
• Hisham Kassem pushed back the limits of press freedom in Egypt by publishing the Cairo Times, a small but widely-noted English weekly in the 1990s. Then he became the founding publisher of al-Masry al-Youm, the first fully independent Arabic daily in Egypt since Nasser took power, which has transformed the press scene in Egypt. He is also chairman of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.
• Bassem Eid was the principal investigator for B’Tselem, an Israeli organization combating mistreatment of Palestinians. When Yasser Arafat returned to the occupied territories in1994 and established the Palestinian Authority, Eid grew alarmed at mounting abuses of Palestinian citizens by Arafat’s regime, so he left B’Tselem and founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.
• Rola Dashti was the leader of the campaign that in 2005 won women the right of women to vote and hold office in Kuwait. In 2009 she and three other women won election to parliament.
• Ammar Abdulhamid is a human rights activist and blogger who was Syria’s most outspoken dissident until a face-to-face death threat from Bashar Asad’s security chief impelled him to flee the country.

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