Karima Bennoune has written a thought provoking book. Invaluable reading for anyone wishing to form a better understanding of the struggle for freedom, justice and equal opportunity by courageous individuals in places where totalitarian interpretations of Islam aim to suppress these universal values by terrorising those who strive for them.
In Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here the Algerian/American
Human Rights lawyer Karima Bennoune presents a number of important people to
us who deserve to be much better known in the West than they currently are.
Like Bennoune, they fight for dignity, justice, personal freedom and equal
opportunity for men and women against radical Islamist movements that want to
deny them. Many of them, though by no means all, are women. All of them are
active in countries where it is in the name of fundamentalist interpretations
of Islam that they have often endured the constant threat of terrible violence
to themselves and to those dear to them. In many instances that threat has been
realised. Through her interviews Bennoune enables us to hear the protagonists
speak in their own voice.
As the daughter of a man who suffered such threats himself,
Bennoune knows what this means from personal experience and she is able to
convey it vividly to her readers. As a Human Rights lawyer working for NGOs
like Amnesty International, she also understands how to address these instances
with professionalism.
Bennoune collected her interviews and wrote her book in the
midst of the period when the hopes elicited by the Arab Spring turned into near
despair in most of the Arab world. This made her work particularly challenging
and the outcome especially interesting.
Unusually as a writer closely associated with the Human
Rights movement in the West, Bennoune is an important voice denouncing the
tolerance towards Islamist political movements of the liberal and not so
liberal left, including her former employer Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch and similar NGOs as well as many Western governments. How easily they are
fooled by the dissimulation of “moderate” Islamism and the willingness of
radical Islamist movements to participate in a “faux-democratic” process. This
she finds is often based on a flimsy understanding of the nature of the path to
true democracy and a wilful blindness towards any movement that share the
Western political Left’s dislike of the US and its policies particularly those
towards the wider Middle East.
Her book also stands out from the crowd because she manages
to combine the personal with the professional and is willing and able to turn a
clear and critical eye on herself.
Bennoune illustrates the impact of what she sees as the
blatant misuse of Islam for a violent ideology suppressing the freedom of
people and particularly to enjoy not only a dignified life but also theatre,
music, and culture. And she shows how courageous women and courageous men stand
up against incredible odds and in the face of terrifying violence in mostly non-violent
struggles for justice and dignity for themselves their families and their
people.
Karima Bennoune is a talented writer able to paint a vivid
picture of the people she has interviewed and the countries with their specific
political and social circumstances that form the specific background for each
of the human rights activists she has interviewed. Not surprisingly she
succeeds particularly well in telling the story of her native Algeria where
people died in their thousands as a result of fundamentalist violence
under reported and often misunderstood and misrepresented in the West. The chapter on Iranian human rights activists is also particularly successful. Less coherent is her apparent need to limit what others will make of her book, particularly when, after criticising the misdeeds of the Islamist Hamas, she pronounces her own Fatwa on supporters of the current Israeli Government using her findings to comfort their own positions in any way. This seems to have to do more with US leftist university campus politics - Bennoune is a law professor at UC Davis - than the subject of her book as she does not feel she has to distance herself just as strongly from anti-Islamists in the US and the West who do not share her leftist political convictions.
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is a very readable and
thought provoking book. Invaluable reading for anyone in the West wishing to
form a better understanding of the struggle for freedom, justice and equal
opportunity by courageous individuals in places where totalitarian
interpretations of Islam aim to suppress these universal values by terrorising
those who strive for them.
Karima Bennoune
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