The “Dream Deferred” Essay Contest
on Civil Rights in the Middle East

Panel of Judges

Dr. Azar Nafisi - Ammar Abdulhamid - Zainab Al-Suwaij
Mahmood Al-Yousif - Ahmed Benchemsi - Dr. Tom Palmer
Gloria Steinem - Dr. Rola Dashti - Lily Mazahery, Esq. - Dr. Shafeeq Ghabra

Dr. Azar Nafisi
Nafisi is author of the best-seller Reading Lolita in Tehran and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. While teaching English literature at Tehran University during the Iranian revolution, she and her students faced civil rights restrictions. In 1995, Nafisi quit her university position and invited seven of her female students to attend private meetings in her home every Thursday to discuss literature. Nafisi moved to the US in 1997, and in 2003 published her memoir, which explores the transformative power of fiction under tyranny. Reading Lolita in Tehran has spent over 100 weeks on the bestseller list and been translated into 32 languages. Nafisi lectures on civil rights issues in Iran and advises several international human rights organizations.

Ammar Abdulhamid
Abdulhamid is a Syrian poet, novelist, and activist. Son of legendary actress Muna Wassef, Abdulhamid attended university in the US and became an Islamist imam for a short while. The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie shook his radicalism, and he eventually returned to Syria to work on civil rights projects. He is a co-founder of DarEmar, a publishing house designed to raise standards of civic awareness in the Arab world, and the Tharwa Project, an initiative addressing minority issues in the Mideast. Abdulhamid is fellow at the Brookings Institution, blogs at Amarji.blogspot.com, and has been profiled in the Washington Post and New York Times.


Zainab Al-Suwaij
Al-Suwaij is the co-founder of the American Islamic Congress (AIC). Part of an established Iraqi religious family, Al-Suwaij grew up under Saddam Hussein's rule. In high school, she refused pressure to join the Ba'ath Party and began writing poetry as an outlet from repression. In 1991, she participated in the failed uprising against Hussein and later fled to the US. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, she founded the AIC so that American Muslims would take the lead in promoting tolerance and civil rights in the US and in the Muslim world. She has published in the New York Times, appeared ABC’s 20/20, and met with the President. She collaborates with the genocide education project Facing History and organizes human rights conferences in Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt.

Gloria Steinem
Steinem has been called "America's most influential, eloquent, and revered feminist" and is the founder of Ms. magazine. Early in her career she struggled to find work as a journalist because editors wanted to hire only male reporters. She persevered, becoming an assistant editor at New York Magazine and writing many controversial articles on women's rights. In the 1970s, she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus and the Coalition of Labor Union Women. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and is the author of Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, a bestseller that has been translated into 11 languages. She is also co-founder of the Greenstone Media women's radio project.

Ahmed Benchemsi
Benchemsi edits the acclaimed Moroccan weekly magazine Tel Quel, which made international headlines with a January 2005 cover story on the salary of Morocco's king. Tel Quel has addressed many taboos in Moroccan society (see, for example, an expose on Morocco's security services). He has been recognized for his groundbreaking journalism with fellowships at the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek magazine. He gained more international attention when Tel Quel through defamation fines of nearly 2 million dirham (roughly $250,000) - and threatened to jail Benchemsi if he did not pay. His new Arabic publication is Nichane.


Dr. Rola Dashti
An independent entrepreneur, Dashti chairs the Kuwaiti Economic Society and was among the first women ever to run as a candidate for Parliament in Kuwait. In March of 2005, she led successful protests demanding women's suffrage in Kuwait. She has also worked with the International Red Cross in Lebanon; demanded information on hundreds of Kuwaitis taken as prisoners during the Gulf War; and spurred grassroots activism among women in rural villages in Tunisia and Yemen. An Arabic transcription of one of Dashti’s speeches on women’s participation in politics can be found here.

Dr. Tom Palmer
Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was active in the movement to support freedom and propagate classical liberal ideas in Eastern Europe under Communism. He smuggled books, photocopiers, and fax machines from an office in Austria and traveled throughout the region leading seminars for young activists. He now works with Middle Eastern intellectuals to promote liberty in the Arab world. Palmer helped launch the "Lamp of Liberty" (Misbah al-Hurriyya) website of writings on liberty in Arabic, and he has lectured in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Oman. He blogs at tomgpalmer.com.


Lily Mazahery, Esq.
Mazahery is a Persian-American attorney and founder the Legal Rights Institute. Her efforts to save the lives of women on “death row” in Iran (for example: "Save Nazanin", "Save Ashraf", and "Save Malak") have received worldwide media attention, and several cases have been overturned as a result of her campaigns. Mazahery provides expert commentary on Iranian law, as well as human rights violations across the Middle East. She has testified before the U.S. Congress on the atrocities committed against women in Iran by the ruling regime, including public stoning, and denial of child custody rights. She also assists the Iran Freedom Concert.

Dr. Shafeeq Ghabra
Ghabra is the past president of the American University of Kuwait, an institution he helped launch. A Palestinian-Kuwaiti, he currently leads the Jussor Arabiyya Center for Leadership and writes a column for newspapers in Kuwait, Lebanon, and the UAE (for example, on authoritarian government in the region and the culture of violence in Iraq), as well as the webportal Misbahalhurriyya.org. Ghabra is regularly interviewed by media sources such as NPR, PBS, and CNN. He is also author of "Palestinians in Kuwait: The Family and the Politics of Survival" and "Israel and the Arabs: From the Conflict of Issues to the Peace of Interests."

Mahmood Al-Yousif
Al-Yousif is the godfather of the blogging scene in Bahrain. His blog, Mahmood's Den, has inspired dozens of young people in the Persian Gulf region to begin blogging. His blog receives over 1.6 million hits each month from around the world. Although some Bahraini bloggers have been arrested for posts to their weblogs, Mahmood remains outspoken. Indeed, the opening of his blog defiantly reads: "I'm NOT registering this site with the Bahraini government." Al-Yousif runs a hi-tech company in Bahrain and is also an avid photographer.