Voices of freedom : the Middle East and North Africa / edited by Dennis Mark, Abunasser Rima.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dennis, Mark, editor.

Abunasser, Rima, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages)

Place of Publication:

United states : Academica Press, [2022]

Summary:

Voices of Freedom: The Middle East and North Africa showcases essays from activists, journalists, novelists, and scholars whose areas of expertise include free speech, peace and reconciliation, alterity-otherness, and Middle Eastern and North African religions and literatures. Co-edited by TCU colleagues Rima Abunasser and Mark Dennis, the volume is meant to serve as a vehicle for giving dignity and depth to the peoples of these regions by celebrating courageous voices of freedom trying to respond to fundamental, often devastating, changes on the ground, including the Arab Spring, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the rise of the Islamic State. Writing in both the first- and third-person, essayists offer deeply moving portraits of voices that cry out for freedom in chaotic, and oftenviolent, circumstances.Voices of Freedom is aimed at college classes that address the many ways in which freedom intersects with politics, religion, and other elements in the societies of these dynamic and diverse regions. It will serve as a valuable primary source for college teachers interested in exploring with their students the struggle for freedom in non-Western and transnational cultural contexts. The volume is also meant to attract other audiences, including readers from the general public interested in learning about inspirational people from parts of the world about which Americans and other English-speaking peoples are generally unfamiliar.

Contents:

Voices of Freedom: The Middle East and North Africa

Edited by

Rima Abunasser and Mark Dennis

Texas Christian University

Voices of Freedom: The Middle East and North Africa

Academica PressWashington~London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dennis, Mark (editor) | Abunasser, Rima (editor)

Title: Voices of freedom : the middle east and north africa | Dennis, Mark | Abunasser, RimaDescription: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021947836 | ISBN 9781680532548 (hardcover) | 9781680532555 (paperback) | 9781680532562 (e-book)

Copyright 2022 Mark Dennis, Rima Abunasser

Dedication

We dedicate this book to all those who aspire to be free and whose voices have been silenced by indifference, contempt, and violence.

We also dedicate it to our friend John Singleton without whose vision, kindness, and unflagging support, it would not have come to fruition.

We also dedicate it to our spouses-Darin Bradley and Priscilla Jaichander-for their love and constant encouragement.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Contributors xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1Accidental Freedoms 17

Diya Abdo

Chapter 2The Birth and Death of Equal Citizenship in Yemen 39

Karima Al-Hadaa

Chapter 3The Well 55

Zainab Al-Khawaja

Chapter 4Individual Freedoms and Rightsin Tunisia: An Ever-lasting Struggle 73

Khedija Arfaoui

Chapter 5Legacies of Exile 93

Rima Abunasser

Chapter 6How To Dismantle an Enemy 109

Michael McRay

Chapter 7"Haven't the Jewish people suffered enough?" 125

Rami Elhanan

Chapter 8Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan: No Room for Tolerance 139

Shugofa Dastgeer

Chapter 9Chronicles of a City We Never Knew 157

Wael Kadour.

Chapter 10"Free Libya": Revolutions and the Politics of Return 207

Amina Zarrugh

Chapter 11The Cost of Freedom: Defamationand the National Security State-A Moroccan Experience 225

Maati Monjib

Acknowledgments

Voices of Freedom is the result of a long collaborative journey that began in 2012, and we are indebted to all the industrious, skilled, and kind people who have helped us along this journey. We would like to recognize them here

naturally, any errors remain our own. John Singleton participated in so many early conversations about this work, helping us to conceptualize the broader project. Ed McNertney and James English were both instrumental in assisting us to connect our project with TCU's QEP

We have also been sustained intellectually and emotionally over the years by conversations surrounding this collection with a long list of friends, family members, and colleagues. They include Darin Bradley

Barbara, Brent, and Joe Dennis

Leslie Hartman

Priscilla, Solomon, and Gladys Jaichander

and Stacie McCormick.

We also value Christopher Johnson, our kind and industrious editor at Academica Press. And we express our thanks to Soumyadev Bose for his diligent work and keen eye. We are sincerely grateful for his patient and generous encouragement. And to Ali Al-Khasrachi, for our book cover's astonishing artistry, our many thanks. We express our gratitude to Dusty Crocker for his exquisite cover design.

And finally, we are grateful to all our contributors, who stayed with our project through its long path from inception to publication. This is their book.

Summer 2021

Contributors

Rima Abunasser (co-editor), "The Inheritance of Exile".

Abunasser is an Instructor in the Department of English at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas where she also serves as core faculty in both the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research focus on how Arab and North African cultural production, both at home and in the diaspora, articulates nationalism, freedom, and home. Abunasser is also in the early stages of writing Other Americans: Home and Self in A

Diya Abdo, "Accidental Freedoms"

Abdo is Director of the Center for New North Carolinians and Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She has published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her public essays focus on the intersection of gender, political identity, and vocation. In 2015, Dr. Abdo founded the Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) initiative which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and assistin

Karima Al-Hadaa, "The Birth and Death of Equal Citizenship in Yemen"

Al-Hadaa is a director at the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation in Yemen. She regularly collaborates with and writes pieces for the US-based Yemen Peace Project.

Zainab Al-Khawaja, "The Well"

Al-Khawaja is part of a well-known revolutionary family in Bahrain. Her father, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, was arrested and tortured after anti-government protests erupted in the small gulf nation in 2011. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains to this day. Zainab also participated in these protests and was vocal on Twitter under the handle AngryArabiya

she was shot in the leg, arrested, tortured, and spent part of her pregnancy in prison. She was later arrested again, this time with h.

Khedija Arfaoui, "Individual Freedoms andRights in Tunisia: An Ever-lasting Struggle"

Arfaoui taught American Studies, Human Rights, and Women's Studies and has, since the 1980s, been an active member of Tunisia's civil society with a particular focus on women's rights. She has been a member of a number of groups including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the Association of Tunisian Women for Research and Development. More recently, she was a member of Amnesty International and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

Mark Dennis (co-editor)

Dennis is Professor of East Asian Religions in the Religion Department at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He also serves as the director of the university's CALM (Compassionate Awareness and Living Mindfully) meditation program. He received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. His research focuses on the earliest period of Japanese Buddhism and he published a translation of the Shōmangyō-gisho, a Buddhist treatise written in classical C

Dennis also works on modern Japanese literature and has co-edited with Darren J. N. Middleton (TCU Religion Department) two anthologies dedicated to the literary art of the modern Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endō. The first, titled Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo's Classic Novel, was published by Bloomsbury in spring 2015, while the second, titled Navigating Deep River: New Perspectives on Shūsaku Endō's Final Novel, was published by SUNY Press in spring 2020. He has also pub

Shugofa Dastgeer, "Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan: No Room for Tolerance".

Dastgeer is Assistant Professor of Journalism at TCU. Denied formal schooling in Afghanistan until she was sixteen, Dastgeer eventually earned a B.A. at Kabul University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Journalism at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She has five years of experience in the media industry, serving as a journalist, news anchor, assistant to the director, and news producer. At TCU she mainly teaches courses in Visual Journalism and Radi

Rami Elhanan, '"Haven't the Jewish People Suffered Enough?'"

Elhanan is a former Israeli reserve soldier turned peace activist with Combatants for Peace. He is a leading member of the Parents Circle-Families Forum (PCFF), an organization for those who have lost children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but nevertheless want peace. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in September 1997. Elhanan is featured in the 2012 documentary called Within the Eye of the Storm. The film was made with partners like the

Wael Kadour, "Chronicles of a city we never knew"

Born in 1981 in Syria, Kadour is a playwright, theatre director, and journalist currently residing in Paris. After graduating from the Damascus Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in 2006, he obtained a writing residency in the London Royal Court Theatre in 2007 within the framework of the 19th edition of the program of International Dramaturgy Residences. Since 2008, he has worked as an artistic collaborator on various projects in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. In 2011, he co-founded Ettijahat, an i

Michael T. McRay, "How To Dismantle an Enemy".

McRay completed an MPhil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation at Trinity College Dublin at Belfast. He is the Southeast Regional Manager for Narrative 4 (www.narrative4.com), founded and curates Tenx9 Nashville Storytelling (www.tenx9nashville.com), and lectures at Lipscomb University. He seeks "to present a platform for the telling of stories that people rarely hear." To this end, he works as the community outreach coordinator at the Tennessee Justice Center, which is a non-profit legal fi.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781680532562

1680532561