Looking forward to tomorrow’s talk by Karima Bennoune, based on her book, Your Fatwa Doesn’t Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton 2013). The event, which I have the honor of moderating, will be at 4 p.m. Thursday, November 14, in the Chapel of the University of Georgia, here in Athens. Details here.

The daughter of a University of Algiers professor/activist, Karima grew up in Algeria and in the United States. She was educated at Michigan Law, and was an Amnesty International attorney in London for a number of years before entering academia. She’s now a law professor at the University of California-Davis.

Since the onset of the so-called Arab Spring, Karima has traveled through dozens of countries, in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, etc. There she’s talked with many different people of Muslim heritage; in particular, with dissidents, journalists, musicians, artists, secularists, women’s activists, and similar “outsiders.” Her book recounts how 2 powerful forces – autocratic governments, one on side, and ideologues, on the other, have squeezed out hoped-for pluralism.

I first met Karima about a dozen years ago, not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when she gave a gripping talk at an American Society of International Law meeting. She’s written frequently on issues of human rights, terrorism, etc., in popular media like The Guardian and The New York Times, and at IntLawGrrls blog. Indeed, her September 11, 2011, IntLawGrrls post entitled “Why I Hate Al Qaeda” forms a basis for a chapter in her new book.

We who are cosponsoring this event – the law school, its Rusk Center, and its student-run international law society, along with the International Law Students Association and the university’s African Studies Institute and Willson Center on Humanities – are delighted her book tour includes Athens.