Trailblazers of the Arab Spring: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East by Joshua Muravchik (PDF)

Description

Before September 11, 2001 we Americans did not think much about freedom or democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policy toward the region aimed to assure a reliable flow of oil, to encourage peace between the Arabs and Israel, and above all, during the Cold War, to prevent our rival from gaining any strategic advantage over us. 9/11 impelled us to reconsider. Now, as we are entangled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan the Mid-East’s political and social quandaries lie at the very core of our foreign policy objectives. And yet, after years of blood and fortune spent on the democratization of the Middle East, the most identifiable personalities in the region are notorious terrorists, backwards autocrats and fanatical preachers. As Joshua Muravchik demonstrates in Trailblazers of the Arab Spring, there are in fact also heroic democrats and liberals in these lands of anti-democratic fanaticism, and the fight they are fighting is also our fight. Muravchik brings to light the stories of seven remarkable people, six Arabs and an Iranian. Five are men; two, women. Four are Sunnis, two are Shiites, and the seventh is mixed. All are devoted passionately to a cause, and, while the angles from which they attack it are varied, the larger goal is the same for all seven—to make their countries more open and democratic. Trailblazers of the Arab Spring reminds us that freedom is a prize that must be won through struggle and sacrifice, and it introduces us to our anonymous friends who have consecrated their lives to the birth of free societies in the Middle East.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Seven stories of seven heterodox men and women of Islamic countries. I thought this book would be a lot of academic jargon, abstract discussion, high politics and geopolitics all mixed up, even though I had already read a book by Mr. Muravchik on Socialism and, thus, harbored some hope this book would be made as easy as possible to follow by the general reader. My hope was exceeded: the book tells the close-up stories of seven individuals from seven different Islamic countries who felt attracted to the liberalism and open societies of the West, who chose to differ from the religious and political authoritarianism of their countries’ rulers, and finally decided to risk their lives defending freedom of speech, or religion, and to the protection of human rights. Most came to the Unites States and could get to know the “enemy” state, as their ruling classes would put it, and came to love America and the beliefs for which it stands. But one thing, above all the rest, does unite these now middle-aged group of men and women, and that is courage and ingenuity.Each life is a wonderful story; told with the easiness and craft of a masterful writer. Intense lives. We grow and become adults along with the characters as we read. We come to understand why these individuals chose freedom and human rights and repudiated intolerance and authoritarianism. In the end, the way of life the Islamic countries gave themselves, they figured out, is just an excuse for their mullahs, their corrupt ruling classes: religious leaders hand-in-hand with the secular politicians, to have all the power safely kept for themselves, generation after generation. Religion is just a tool. The ayatollahs themselves are the greatest hypocrites, whose lives do not agree with their preaching, and couldn’t care less for their religion and more for power-grabbing, sex and wealth.The men and women of these real stories had to fight first against their own doubts and inner misgivings, religion-wise and politics-wise. With hardly anyone to share thoughts and feelings; with tradition, cradle to grave indoctrination, and the totalitarian State all working against you, molding your heart and your mind into submission, it takes more than a simple dose of courage to stand up and fight the political and religious status quo. But we are in 2013 (the book was published in 2009), even in the Middle East. And with the new technologies and means of communication, and the more and more people being able to see for themselves the world outside the Islamic curtain, it is -and will increasingly be- easier for more and more young people to challenge the regime in each of their own countries. We are seeing big changes in the last few years: uprisings in most of the Middle East countries. Though not clearly democratic and liberal in their ideologies (they largely maintain their Islamic character, sharia law included), yet they are, I believe, a step forward in the right direction, that’s why the heroes of this stories can be alluded to as the fathers of future democracy in the Middle East.This book is easy to read. It is passionately told and engaging. No need to look for cheap fiction stories. Here’s the real deal: real men and women fighting to be free -specially in the case of women. They raise up their voices; we in the West should at least listen to them. If their regimes had been Catholic instead of Muslim, I bet you the liberal West would have done a lot more to put a stop to it long time ago, but we are no less hypocrites than the mullahs themselves.

⭐I found this book intelligent and inspiring. It’s hard not to be captivated by the voices of the courageous people the author presents, and impossible not to feel uplifted. We are introduced to seven exceptional individuals, five men and two women, one each from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait and Syria. Each is doing the remarkable work of trying to bring democracy to his or her country. Muravchik is a good storyteller and I found that the pages turned themselves. In addition to being fascinated by their stories and situations, I was quite moved by the passionate commitments each of these people had made, risking life and safety to work for human rights and justice in a region that has known little of freedom.

⭐Over the last two decades, I have read countless volumes on comparative politics in the Middle East, many of which are tremendously informative, but terribly dry. In the Next Founders, Josh Muravchik uses the lens of seven pioneering individuals to convey a large amount of information about politics within the seven critical countries in which they live. By putting a human face on an extraordinarily complex set of political dynamics, the book leaves the reader not only knowing more, but caring more about the struggle for freedom and human rights in the Middle East.

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