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Eye-opening accounts of heroic resistance to religious extremism.

In Lahore, Pakistan, Faizan Peerzada resisted being relegated to a “dark corner” by staging a performing arts festival despite bomb attacks. In Senegal, wheelchair-bound Aïssatou Cissé produced a comic book to illustrate the injustices faced by disabled women and girls. In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his journalists struggled to put out their paper, El Watan (The Nation), the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated their offices and killed eighteen of their colleagues. In Afghanistan, Young Women for Change took to the streets of Kabul to denounce sexual harassment, undeterred by threats. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Abdirizak Bihi organized a Ramadan basketball tournament among Somali refugees to counter the influence of Al Shabaab. From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers often risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries. Journalists, theater directors, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, comics, street vendors, educators, and women’s rights activists—these are some of the people Karima Bennoune interviewed in her three-year investigation of grass-roots opposition to the rising tide of fundamentalism in Muslim populations from Lahore, Pakistan, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her subjects’ own religious views range from the wholly secular to the deeply devout, yet all bear painful witness to the brutal effects of fundamentalist violence and oppression. True defenders of freedom, they struggle to foster creativity, compassion, discussion, and diversity even sometimes in the face of death threats (and more than threats) from armed religious militants. A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism, Karima Bennoune is a professor of law at the University of California–Davis School of Law. Karima Bennoune grew up in Algeria and the United States, and now lives in northern California.