Voices of Freedom

Rima Abunasser, Mark Dennis

Description

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 often
violent, 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.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Religión
• Literature
• Third World
• Politics
• Middle East
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680532562
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Voices of Freedom:
The Middle East and North Africa
Edited by
Rima Abunasser and Mark Dennis
Texas Christian University
Academica Press Washington~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, Rima
Description: 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 Contributors Introduction Chapter 1 Accidental Freedoms Diya Abdo Chapter 2 The Birth and Death of Equal Citizenship in Yemen Karima Al-Hadaa Chapter 3 The Well Zainab Al-Khawaja Chapter 4 Individual Freedoms and Rights in Tunisia: An Ever-lasting Struggle Khedija Arfaoui Chapter 5 Legacies of Exile Rima Abunasser Chapter 6 How To Dismantle an Enemy Michael McRay Chapter 7 “Haven’t the Jewish people suffered enough?” Rami Elhanan Chapter 8 Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan: No Room for Tolerance Shugofa Dastgeer Chapter 9 Chronicles of a City We Never Knew Wael Kadour Chapter 10 “Free Libya”: Revolutions and the Politics of Return Amina Zarrugh Chapter 11 The Cost of Freedom: Defamation and the National Security State—A Moroccan Experience 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, which allowed us to secure indispensable funding for our contributors. Darren J. N. Middleton generously offered advice, commented on our book proposal, and helped us think about publishing. We thank TCU Religion Department Chair Sage Elwell for providing funds to pay for the book’s cover art. Ethan Casey patiently helped us move this project forward in many ways as did Larry Dohrs. We are grateful to them for their time, encouragement, and support.
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.
Rima Abunasser and Mark Dennis 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 Arab American Literature, a monograph that will examine the complex relationship Arab Americans have with the boundaries of whiteness in the United States, arguing that while Arab American bodies are generally rendered invisible, they are acutely visible in the national imagination.
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 assisting them in resettlement. Guilford College, now one of several ECAR campuses, has hosted 45 refugees so far—23 of them children—from Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. For her work on ECAR, Dr. Abdo was the recipient of the 2019 Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award, and she was named a finalist in the Arab Hope Makers Award (2018). Along with
ECAR, she received the Gulf South Summit’s 2017 Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award and the Washington Center’s 2017 Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award. She has been making presentations about ECAR far and wide, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
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 her one-year-old son, in 2017. Her case garnered significant international attention, ultimately leading to her release and deportation.
Khedija Arfaoui, “Individual Freedoms and Rights 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 Chinese and attributed to Japan’s Prince Shotoku (574-622 CE), one of the country’s key early patrons of Buddhism. He published an article in spring 2021 on how this text relates to manuscripts discovered in the caves of Dunhuang, China.
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 Shūsaku Endō’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 published articles on the pedagogy of Asian Studies and contemplative practices.
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 Radio-TV Newswriting. She has published “Visual Framing of Muslim Women in the Arab Spring: Prominent, Active, and Visible” in The International Communication Gazette and “Developing Sustainable News Media in Africa: A Professionalisation Model to Curtail ‘the Brown Envelope’ and Other Corrupting Influences” in the Journal of Media Business Studies.
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 docu