Review of Nasser Weddady and Sohrab Ahmari, editors, Arab Spring Dreams: The Next Generation Speaks Out for Freedom and Justice from North Africa to Iran

Excerpt

This edited volume is a collection of prize-winning essays on the subject of the struggle for liberal democracy in North Africa and the Middle East. Each essay is prefaced by a succinct history of repression in the countries familiar to the writer. Comprised of personal memories of regimes located as far west as Mauritania and as far east as Iran, the editors, both scholars and political activists, have carried out an ambitious project under the private sponsorship of the American Islamic Congress. These essays emerge from among thousands of submissions by individuals presently witnessing the events of the Arab Spring from tenuous positions at the margins of the region’s moral and political economies. The main focal points of the narratives are gender inequality and the persecution of homosexuals, gender inequality and minority racial, religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups. …