Voices of Freedom: The Middle East and North Africa

Introduction

In her 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture, Peace & The New Corporate Liberation Theology, author and activist, Arundhati Roy, noted that [t]here really is no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.¹ Today, Roy’s quote is more relevant than ever. Inundated with information from social media, to traditional publishing, to revolutionary art, to political propaganda, we appear to have more access to people’s voices than ever before. Despite this, so many old, expected representations still hold sway. Antiquated and stereotypical ideas about identity, religion, ethnicity, and race remain the order of the day; new media technologies and expanded individual access to information often reinforce old divisions and obscure and gatekeep those preferably unheard voices, rather than offer clear platforms for those traditionally silenced. Oppressive power structures, in the interest of self-preservation, continue to silence and ignore the voices of those who would challenge their authority.

We begin our introduction with this quote because it illustrates so many of the themes encompassed in these volumes.² The activists, journalists, scholars, and artists included exemplify the most courageous among us, and the stories and experiences they share take us beyond stereotypes and cursory representations of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia and instead, highlight the diversity of those who use their voices to disrupt the status quo, advocate for freedom, and incite debate. As humans we are moved by compelling stories that give depth and voice to others; stories that reveal the highs and lows of our shared human experience. As we turn page after page, such stories help us to enter another person’s thinking and experience—to emotionally and mentally migrate, to borrow Religious Studies scholar Ninian Smart’s helpful phrase.³ As we read, we experience with them their suffering and joys, their loves and losses, whether those stories are told through well-crafted fiction, historical prose, or compelling biographical and autobiographical accounts—all of which appear in the chapters that follow.

In taking on the concept of freedom, the contributors to Voices of Freedom neither impose a fixed theoretical view onto freedom, nor do they suggest a unified approach to this exalted and celebrated, but also notoriously slippery term. These accounts offer vivid testimony to the indomitable spirit that animates the basic human desire to be free, however this elusive term is understood by each author. Rooted in the contemporary realities of the region, each contribution addresses the circumstances within which it was created, the debates surrounding it, the controversies fueling it. In so doing, each contributor adds their voice to a long legacy of activists and writers motivated to disrupt the status quo, to shift the center of discourse, to challenge seemingly immovable systems of power—political, personal, cultural, global. These volumes were inspired by these willfully transgressive voices. Rather than being moved by a series of discrete events or a specific work, we were compelled by the social activists, politicians, journalists, cartoonists, and others whose acts of transgression—shaped in part by transnational representations and the legacies of colonialism in the region—incited debate, invited controversy, and provoked social and personal change.

The works collected here exemplify a wide range of perspectives, approaches, and disciplines. They include activist autobiographies, personal meditations, generational memoirs, academic analyses, speculative fiction, and drama. They address the legacies of European colonialism, the ramifications of nationalism, and the long histories of women’s movements. The pieces that book-end the first volume, Diya Abdo’s Accidental Freedoms and Maati Monjib’s The Cost of Freedom: Defamation and the National Security State—A Moroccan Experience, offer two powerful activist memoirs that trace Abdo’s and Monjib’s respective paths toward intellectual, cultural, and gendered liberation and that frame and encompass so many of the approaches our contributors bring to the collection. Abdo, a first-generation Palestinian born and raised in Jordan, reflects on her family’s dislocation and how that has informed every aspect of her personal and professional life, following her as she has moved across oceans, boundaries, and cultures. She challenges us to consider what freedom looks like for a woman constrained by history, place, and time. Monjib, speaking from the furthest geographic point away from Abdo in the region, offers an activist memoir that describes his decades-long experience as a dissident historian and journalist in Morocco, beginning with his days as a young college student, his long exiles in France and Senegal, and up to his recent hunger strikes, arrests, and ongoing harassment by the Moroccan government. Asking us to consider the costs of dissidence and rebellion, Monjib also challenges us to weigh those costs against the elusive promise of freedom.

The following three chapters present three very different discussions of liberation by women from across the region. In Chapter 2 Karima Al-Hadaa’s The Birth and Death of Equal Citizenship in Yemen, offers a detailed history of nationalism, citizenship, religion, and sectarianism in Yemen that provides insights into the ongoing conflict in the country and its implications for both Yemen and the region at large. Following this, Zainab Al-Khawaja presents an experimental, fantastical short story, The Well, that draws on the mythical and narrative traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, wherein she traces the history and origins of political and religious oppression in Bahrain. She beautifully reimagines the experiences of her revolutionary family as myth and magic, creating a speculative, expansive national and religious space that hearkens back to the earliest Bahraini narratives and that challenges the political forces that have so besieged her family and many like them in recent years. Chapter 4 brings us Khedija Arfaoui’s Individual Freedoms and Rights in Tunisia: An Ever-lasting Struggle. Arfaoui, a member of several political and activist groups, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the Association of Tunisian Women for Research and Development, draws on her decades-long experience as a women’s right advocate to describe the storied history of the women’s movement in Tunisia, leading up to the passing of the landmark law to combat violence against women and girls in 2017.

Rima Abunasser, Michael McRay, and Rami Elhanan address the question of freedom as it pertains to Palestine and Israel, each from deeply personal, lived experiences. Abunasser, the daughter and granddaughter of dislocated Palestinians, offers a generational memoir where she considers the legacies of exile and loss as she navigates the professional and personal spaces of both the Middle East and the United States. McRay, who has worked at the Tennessee Justice Center and teaches courses on forgiveness and reconciliation, Israel-Palestine, storytelling, and international conflict resolution, asks us to consider how one might reformulate the idea of conflict, with an eye toward restorative justice. Elhanan is a former Israeli reserve soldier turned peace activist with Combatants for Peace and a leading member of the Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization for those who have lost children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but nevertheless want peace. Here, he presents two short pieces that reflect on his core beliefs as they relate to peace activism and that meditate on the central place the Holocaust and the tragic loss of his young daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bombing play in his peace activism.

The following three chapters move us to consider some of the most visible, yet most notoriously misrepresented, parts of the region. In Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan: No Room for Tolerance, Shugofa Dastgeer draws on her experience as a seasoned journalist and academic to describe the challenges surrounding freedom of expression in Afghanistan before and since the US military operations in the region. Wael Kadour, Syrian playwright, theater director, and journalist, offers his play Chronicles of a city we never knew, that focuses on the transformations and challenges of living in Syria during the civil war, articulated through the viewpoint of its female protagonist. Amina Zarrugh’s ‘Free Libya’: Revolutions and the Politics of Return considers the multiple meanings and dimensions of return in the post-2011 revolutionary context of Libya to address how these types of return illustrate the multiple dimensions and meanings of freedom and its relationship to the past.

Genesis of Voices of Freedom

Voices of Freedom emerges out of a pedagogical collaboration that began in 2012 and that sought to center the voices of revolutionaries, activists, and writers from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia in our courses. As teachers and scholars in different yet overlapping fields, our goal was and continues to be the creation of representational platforms for historically marginalized voices, particularly those that are often (or always) misrepresented or used as confirmation of existing biases and oppressive structures. As editors and contributors, we had become exasperated with the ways in which writers and activists from these regions were so often narrowly conceived as little more than victims of their own cultures, as people waiting for external salvation from some sort of Western cultural or political entity. Ultimately, we decided to work together to produce these two books—originally conceived as a single volume—with chapters dedicated to multiple voices of freedom, focusing on the regions we know well but whose histories and current conditions many of our students have not studied in any depth.

We originally solicited essays in roughly equal numbers from both regions—the Middle East and North Africa as well as Asia—although we did not intend to, nor could we, cover every country in these regions, nor could we achieve a perfect balance across religions, ethnic groups, and so on. As we began work on Voices of Freedom, our list of contributors started to grow organically out of our teaching, scholarly contacts, and experience with TCU’s Quality Enhancement Program (QEP) titled Discovering Global Citizenship, which, from its inception in 2013 to its conclusion in 2018,⁴ highlighted a different set of countries, many of them located in the two regions covered in the two volumes.

Although we have worked extensively with freedom in our teaching and scholarship, our goal here is—like that of our contributors—not to impose fixed ideas about freedom onto the project. Rather, we feel a more authentic engagement with freedom as an abstraction comes from working inductively: that is, by closely examining the content of the individual chapters, you will gain understanding of the breadth and nuance of this term. Despite the word’s ambiguity, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts unequivocally: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.⁵ And while each of us may agree with this clear declaration about freedom, the situation on the ground in each of the countries covered in our two books, as well as in our own society, shows that the gap between aspiration and reality is wide.

The Humanities: Exploring the Human Spirit

In our classes, we have seen how statistics and other such data, while useful, can easily become numerical abstractions with little power to persuade. Although these numbers should be remembered, studied, and discussed since they help to convey the magnitude of massive and acute human anguish, they often lack the nuance and visceral power of the personal story like those that might have been told about any one of the millions upon millions of victims and survivors of genocidal, colonial, and racist settler violence of the past and present, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. As we complete the first volume of Voices of Freedom in June 2021, each day brings further tragedy as the news updates the horrific and rapidly rising death toll, which appears on nameless bars and graphs on the pages of American newspapers and magazines: more than 600,000 people have died in the US from the complications of the virus and the death toll is rising rapidly in India, Brazil, and elsewhere. These numbers do not—nor can they be expected to—tell the story of each individual who suffered and then perished, often alone and gasping for breath.

And so, while we and our contributors have sometimes included facts—dates, numbers, and other such data in these two books—as humanists, we feel most at home when studying, discussing, and celebrating other human beings, seeking to understand their—indeed, our—essence and the wonderfully diverse manifestations of being human, to reverse the phrase. In this way, our research, including Voices of Freedom, focuses on the human spirit as told through the stories of individual and collective voices of freedom from diverse peoples from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia—areas of the world where that spirit expresses itself in richly diverse and fascinating ways. And it is, of course, the human spirit of our contributors that animates, or breathes life into, these books.

Although many areas of academic study touch upon that human spirit in some way, the Humanities, part of the Liberal Arts, has it right there in the name. As such, our vision for this project has been deeply influenced by the Humanities’ critical methods of inquiry and thus by the sorts of questions that humanists—philosophers, religious visionaries, and political thinkers, but also poets, novelists, satirists, and others—have, in their own way, grappled with for millennia, whether we look to the rich philosophical and moral traditions of the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, or elsewhere.

We can recognize the power of such stories to persuade simply by considering the lengths to which oppressive regimes will go to suppress the voices that tell them. Those with such power try to silence those voices by, for instance, creating cultural traditions, legal systems, and governmental policies that exclude these others from the basic activities of civic life—the political process, educational opportunity, wealth accumulation, and so on. Indeed, we have seen time and again how our students are moved by individual stories of agonizing suffering and heartbreak that also often come with inspiring messages of courage and hope, whether the voices that tell those stories belong to recognizable names like Malala Yousafzai or the Dalai Lama, or to those whose names may not be widely known but who are equally courageous and important. Although you may recognize several names in our two volumes, most chapters share the stories of people whose names you have likely never heard. Even so, we are confident that you will be moved by their stories of bravery and resolute dedication to total liberation.

Critical Thinking in the Humanities Classroom

Although we teach different academic subjects in the Humanities and have distinct life experiences, we share a commitment to creating diverse learning spaces and to centering diversity and equity efforts in our classes. And though critical thinking is a central practice in our classes, activism, and research, it is, much like freedom itself, open to widely divergent interpretations.

Critical thinking naturally includes a set of intellectual and linguistic skills: the ability to comprehend a complex piece of text, analyze an argument, write a cogent paper, and make an oral presentation. These are quite valuable skills and we practice them regularly with our students. But we also believe that robust critical thinking should also be informed by emotional, aesthetic, and even spiritual, dispositions that reflect who we are as embodied human beings with voices and aspirations. As such, we encourage our students to cultivate an interpretive stance that is open-minded, curious, and compassionate, one that values diversity, equity, and inclusiveness, and seeks out the sublime and the transcendent.

We also teach critical thinking as a form of integrative practice that seeks to understand the broader contours of the human experience by directly challenging the fragmentation of knowledge and human existence that our current educational and political systems promote. So, we encourage students to make connections across academic fields, social realms, and ways of knowing while teaching them to recognize, as they explore the rich diversity of the human experience, that knowledge, language, and claims to absolute truth are, at least in the Humanities, social constructs always open to interpretation, manipulation, and debate. While this uncertainty can be quite frustrating, it can also be liberating, giving us the freedom to explore other possibilities for being, for expressing ourselves, and for making connections beyond those bestowed on us by birth and social location. In this way, we open up the richness of a world that is complex and wondrous, cruel and compassionate, beautiful and ugly. It is a delicate dance and it requires repeated practice.

In this way, we teach our students to be patient and to become comfortable with ambiguity and open-ended questions like those these volumes pose about freedom and other related topics. We emphasize that they should remain constantly vigilant about clear-cut binaries that can easily seduce them into accepting essentialized images of an entire group of people, whether Arabs or Persians, Palestinians or Israelis, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. And so while our approach sees value in identifying broader patterns of thought and behavior across cultures and regions, like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), we remind students to search constantly for the individuality and uniqueness of each case—of each voice and story, of each face that we see, whether we see that face in a film or photograph, in our mind’s eye as we read a finely-crafted novel, or in a direct, face-to-face, encounter in the material world of physical bodies. As such, we encourage our students to engage in emotional and mental migration to parts of the world that have often been viewed in the United States, and the West more broadly, through such essentialized and reductionist images.

In conversations we have with our students about the brutal legacies of colonialism, we teach them to resist the seductive danger of absolute truth claims, especially the belief that we—whoever we might be—hold the truth and can thus simply dismiss the beliefs of others as false or dangerous, childish or distorted, blasphemous or heretical. The tendency to believe that we possess the unerring truth is a common human impulse evident throughout our world’s history whether it is based on a religious teaching or a political, economic, or other sort of philosophy or ideology.

To help our students develop as effective critical thinkers, we also ask them to reflect upon the nature and function of language—how we, as human beings, use language to communicate, form connections, and persuade but also to distort, manipulate, and subjugate. Here, we discuss with them how the metaphors we use in daily life to make sense of the world can be useful but can also limit our understanding of the things of that world by foreclosing all manner of possible interpretations. For example, if you, as a student, view your teachers as guides instead of judges, as Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth suggests, your relationship to them can shift in subtle, but important ways.⁶ As judges, you may imagine your teachers sitting at an elevated desk, ready to pound a gavel while shouting, Guilty! They may then render a harsh verdict to you in the form of a low grade. But if you envision your teachers as guides, then that relationship will be recast as you might imagine walking along a path in a beautiful nature preserve as they patiently and kindly teach you the names of the flora and fauna but also warn you not to touch the poison ivy. And so, while our students grapple with open-ended Humanities questions that defy easy, clear-cut answers, they are led, inevitably, to more questions. While this may seem like a limit or a failure of the questions themselves, or of the method of inquiry, this is not the case. Rather, developing as a critical thinker requires struggling again and again with the kind assistance of seasoned guides.

Questions of Enduring Importance

As you read the chapters that follow, then, we invite you to take part in that endeavor and hope you will consider what L.D. Burnett calls questions of enduring importance, ⁷ several of which emerge from the pieces included here. We ask you to consider how you, as one representative of humankind, might attempt to answer those questions.

What is the value of human life? Are all lives of equal value, or does it depend on context? That is, does the value of another human’s life differ when we calculate it through an actuarial and legalistic lens in contrast to estimating its inherent value that comes from simply being another human being? While the former calculation is the work of accountants, lawyers, and judges, the latter is often the territory of philosophers, novelists, artists, and religious thinkers as well as activists, journalists,