Maher Gabra
Maher Gabra is an Arab Egyptian specializing in the Middle East, the ideology of political Islam and the level of support for democratic norms in the Middle East. Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, where Maher co-founded two human rights organizations. He has Master's degree, and is a Fulbright Scholar. Maher was actively involved in the political mobilization during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and won a democracy fellowship that same year from the World Affairs Institute. In June 2013, observing the undermining of the Egyptian constitution by the Muslim Brotherhood under the leadership of then-President Mohammad Morsi, Maher also became active in the political protests that led to Morsi being forced from power. At the moment, he is focused on counter-terrorism, defeating radical Islamism, and democracy-building in the Arab world; how to change the intellectual landscape that has been created in the Muslim world by the dominance of Islamist interpretations of history; Islam's role in the world, and Islamic exceptionalism that dominates the educational system, mosques, and so on, throughout the Middle East. The dominance of such interpretations means that all a young Muslim ever hears in most parts of the Middle East, in schools, mosques, online, etc, is one, very stilted, version of history and Islamic identity, which virtually guarantees the spread of virulent forms of Islam. Maher is trying to devise strategies that can counter this trend.
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Bahareh Hedayat is a human rights activist who has spent over six years in an Iranian prison for "insulting" Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for "actions against national security, propagation of falsehoods, mutiny and illegal congregation." Hedayat is the longest serving female prisoner of conscience in Iran.
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