A Celebration of Women™

is elated to Celebrate the Life of this female activist of Human Rights, a learned powerhouse that has taken on the world by storm, author, philanthropist, woman. Experiencing childhood in Algeria then moving to California for further study with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, this brave soul has taken on the legacy of her father in making a life of speaking out against fundamentalism and terrorism.

 
 

 

WOMAN of ACTION™

 

 

Karima Bennoune

“I think when we talk about Muslim fundamentalism, we have to actually talk about it. It exists.

It gravely menaces the human rights of people of Muslim heritage.”

 
 
 
Karima Bennoune is a professor of international law at the University of California–Davis School of Law. She grew up in Algeria and the United States and now lives in northern California.

The topic of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is a very personal one for her. Mahfoud Bennoune, her father, was an outspoken professor at the University of Algiers who faced death threats during the 1990s, but continued speaking out against fundamentalism and terrorism.

In writing this book, Karima set out to meet people who are today doing what her father did back then, to try to garner for them greater international support than Algerian democrats received during the 1990s.

She graduated from a joint program in law and Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan, earning a J.D. cum laude from the law school and an M.A. from the Rackham Graduate School, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies.

In 1995, she served as a Center for Women’s Global Leadership delegate to the NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing where she provided legal advice to the Tribunal for Global Accountability for Violations of Women’s Human Rights. From 1995 until 1999 she was based in London as a legal adviser at Amnesty International.

She came to UC Davis from Rutgers School of Law – Newark where she was Professor of Law and Arthur L. Dickson Scholar, and taught international law and human rights for ten years. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rutgers University–Newark.

Bennoune’s courses have included International Law, International Protection of Human Rights, Terrorism and International Law, Women’s Human Rights and, in 2012, a new course called Law and the Arab Spring which drew from her fieldwork in North Africa. Professor Bennoune has also been a visiting scholar and visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School where she won the L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in teaching.

Her publications have appeared in many leading academic journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the European Journal of International Law, and the Michigan Journal of International Law. They have been widely cited, including on Slate, in the Nation magazine, the Dallas Morning News, and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and the UN Special Rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism. Her article, “Terror/Torture,” was designated one of the Top 10 global security law review articles of 2008 by Oxford University Press.

She has lectured around the world, including at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, UC-Berkeley School of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law and the Yale Law School in the U.S., as well as for the UN Department of Political Affairs, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of Oslo, the Feminist Leadership Institute in Senegal, CODESRIA (The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and the Second Istanbul Conference on Democracy and Global Security. Making frequent media appearances, Bennoune has spoken on Fox TV, National Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Service, CBC-Radio, HuffPost Live, and the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, and has been interviewed by the International Herald Tribune and the Guardian.

In 2007, Professor Bennoune became the first Arab-American to win the Derrick Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups. She has served as a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. Currently, she sits on the Board of the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws.

Karima Bennoune has also been a consultant on human rights issues for the International Council on Human Rights Policy, the Soros Foundation, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Her human rights field missions have included Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Fiji, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Korea, southern Thailand, and Tunisia.

In 2009-2010 she was one of a group of international experts assembled by Leiden University, under the auspices of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, to develop a new set of policy recommendations on counter-terrorism and international law.

She traveled to Algeria in February 2011 to serve as an observer at pro-democracy protests with the support of the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, writing a series of articles about these events for the Guardian.

In October 2011, she volunteered as an election observer during the Tunisian constituent assembly elections with Gender Concerns International. She has published widely including with the Guardian, Comment is Free, the website of Al Jazeera English, The Nation, and many others.

VOICE OF ALGERIA – Karima Bennoune Part 1

As unrest continues to mount across the Middle East, this is a powerful declaration by Prof. Karima Bennoune, Professor of Law and Arthur L. Dickson Scholar at Rutgers School of Law. She explains her eye-witness stand in Algeria during her recent trip… stating that democracy and stablity will not exist without confronting women’s inequality …
 
 

“Could I defend my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife?”

‘This was the question I pondered on Tuesday June 29, 1993. That day I woke up early in Dad’s apartment, on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door.

It had been exactly two weeks since the murder of Dr. Mahfoud Boucebsi, the country’s leading psychiatrist, and one week since the assassination of Mohamed Boukhobza, a sociologist and former colleague of my father’s at the University of Algiers. As a local newspaper described the season, “at the time, every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of …fundamentalist assassins.”

Boucebsi and Boukhobza, and others, had been killed that year by the Muslim fundamentalist armed groups that plagued Algeria’s predominantly Muslim population. The learned Dr. Boukhobza was tied up in front of his daughter and had his throat cut’. – Karima Bennoune

Most recently, her writing about North and West Africa has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times.

Book Review: ‘Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here‘ by Karime Bennoune

UNTOLD STORIES FROM THE FIGHT AGAINST MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISM

In Lahore, Pakistan, Faizan Peerzada (pictured, left) resisted being relegated to a “dark corner” by staging a performing arts festival despite bomb attacks. In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his fellow journalists struggled to put out their papers the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated their offices, killing eighteen of their colleagues and neighbors.

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 recruitment efforts by Al Shabaab. In Egypt, female demonstrators tried to reclaim Tahrir Square on international women’s day despite Salafist harassment. In neighboring Sudan, women activists were dragged away from a Khartoum protest against the flogging of women for wearing trousers, but vowed to return “again and again.”

From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers sometimes risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries and communities.

Despite their courage and creativity, and the urgency of their efforts, this global community of writers, artists, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, activists, and educators of Muslim heritage remains largely invisible at the international level, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other.

Increasingly frustrated with the stagnant, politicized public dialogue about the “clash of civilizations,” Karima Bennoune, an international human-rights lawyer, professor and activist, set out on an epic journey to change the conversation. She interviewed nearly 300 people from almost 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali and beyond. A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism, Bennoune draws on this extensive fieldwork and interviews to illuminate the inspiring stories of those who represent one of the best hopes for ending fundamentalist oppression worldwide.

Eye-opening accounts of heroic resistance to religious extremism.

In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his fellow journalists struggled to put out their papers the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated Press House, killing eighteen of their colleagues and neighbors. PHOTO CREDIT: EL WATAN

In Afghanistan, Young Women for Change took to the streets of Kabul to denounce sexual harassment, undeterred by threats.

And many more…

From North Africa to South Asia and beyond, women and men of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism and terrorism in their own countries through artistic expression, journalism, grassroots organizing and public protest – no matter the risk or the lack of international support.

EXCERPT FROM YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE
Chapter 5: Dying for Knowledge

“Amel Zenoune-Zouani’s watch stopped at 5:17
Amel Zenoune-Zouani’s watch stopped at 5:17.

That is the moment she fell in the street on January 26, 1997, an instant after a member of the Armed Islamic Group cut her throat on the outskirts of Sidi Moussa.

In November 2012, when I am finally able to locate them in a quartier populaire east of Algiers, I spend several hours talking with Amel’s mother, Houria, and her surviving daughters. Sitting on the couch in front of her TV, Khalti Houria (Auntie Houria) as everyone calls her, wears a long blue dress and glasses that hang around her neck. Both stalwart and shattered, she shows me Amel’s watch, which was returned by the gendarmes. Its white face features small green flower buds just under the spot where the glass is broken. The second hand still aims optimistically upward, frozen fifty-seven seconds after 5:17, approaching a 5:18 that will not come.

Twenty-two years old and a third-year law student at the University of Algiers, Amel lived in the dorm. She wanted to visit her family on that seventeenth day of Ramadan, a day known as Ghazwat Badr in commemoration of a historic Muslim victory. So she boarded the bus for Sidi Moussa, and would never finish law school.

Amel’s mother tells me everything she had heard about what happened on the bus. Just outside the town, the vehicle was stopped at a faux barrage. Amel occupied a seat behind the driver, who was a neighbor, and held her schoolbag. Though she did not cover her head in Algiers, and wore makeup, she had a friend’s shawl wrapped around her hair when the men from the Armed Islamic Group climbed aboard. One came to Amel, hit her on the shoulder, and said, “Ahl al houkouma” (partisans of the government).

“Get up. Kill her.” They grabbed the law student by the arm. Still, she dared to say, “Don’t touch me.”

According to Khalti Houria, Amel then “turned and looked at everyone.” Even now the mother appeals to her daughter’s fellow passengers as she weeps: “Amel did not speak but begged you with her eyes and asked you to save her.” No one could. “When they got out of the bus, one armed man had a knife and was rubbing it on the pavement, preparing to kill her.”

There are two versions of what happened next. Some said Amel was kicked as she was getting out of the bus and fell to the ground; others remembered that she had her throat cut while still standing. Her death was an atrocity. It was also meant as a warning. In the moment after

Amel’s watch stopped, the GIA men told all the other passengers: “If you go to school, if you go to the university, the day will come when we will kill all of you like this.”

The terrorists had posted placards all over Sidi Moussa saying that young people must stop studying and stay home. As a law professor, I want to understand why a young woman with her whole life ahead of her would continue her legal education when she could be murdered as a result. Apparently, Amel had said to her father, “I will study law and you will always have your head high. I am a girl, and you will always be proud of me. I will do the work of a man.” Mrs. Zenoune, herself a housewife, had long dreamed of her children studying. All six did.

Amel’s sister Amena explains: “Our mother inculcated in us the idea that studying means you are a free woman. Mom said, ‘I am ready to lose all four of them. I will sacrifice them for knowledge.’ When people remember ‘Amel Zenoune who was assassinated by the terrorists,’ they say, ‘The girl who was killed for studying law.’ People say, ‘She was the example for us.’ ”

While still cherishing the values Amel died for, her death was an agony for her family. And so was the way they found out about it. Sidi Moussa, as the sewing teachers had recalled, was then a wasteland of terror. Its people had no running water, no electricity after the terrorists attacked the power station, and no telephone service. So the family was never sure when to expect Amel or their other daughters home.

Finally, twenty policemen showed up at the door, but, faced with the mother and her younger children, the policemen found themselves unable to deliver the news they had come to give. One asked Houria how many of her daughters studied in Algiers, then told her enigmatically that she and her husband had been ordered to meet the prosecutor in Blida the next day. Their work undone, the cops drove off and left the family wondering in the dark. Khalti Houria had a bad feeling. Any of her college-student daughters, or all three, could have been headed home that night.

When the police left, a group of neighbors came to the apartment, including the bus driver’s wife. Everyone assumed that the family now knew the news. Khalti Houria begged the driver’s wife, “Fatiha, tell me.” So the driver’s wife shared as much as she could: “They cut your daughter’s throat.” This answer only left terrible questions for Khalti Houria. “I said, ‘Which one?’ One neighbor said, ‘The one who wore glasses.’ ” No one seemed to know the precise facts.

With no one able to give her a definite answer, and no working phone, Khalti Houria ignored the evening curfew and took off with her young son, running through the perilous streets of Sidi Moussa until she got to the gendarmerie. When she finally found herself face-to-face with a gendarme, Khalti Houria remembers saying, “ ‘My son, tell me how many of my daughters.’ He said, ‘Madame, one only. The one who was at the law school. She was wearing jeans and a coat.’” The bereaved mother insisted: “Swear to me.” He swore. So, in the most awful moment of her life, she actually felt gratitude. “I prayed and I sat and kissed the earth and I said, ‘God give me strength.’ They were all three at the university. It was a little less painful that it was one rather than two, or three.” Even as she found out she had not lost three daughters, the reality that one was gone, and how, sank in.

But Khalti Houria’s agony gave way to rage. “I sat on the ground and said everything that came into my mind. That hour my struggle began.” Her daughter Amena describes the mother’s long walk home through the desolation of Sidi Moussa. “The commissariat was far from where we lived. All along the road, Mama insulted the terrorists. She didn’t stop. The police said, ‘If we had ten mothers who had lost their child who did what Mme. Zenoune did, the terrorists would never have won in Sidi Moussa. Never.’ There are many who died before Amel, God have mercy on her soul. No one had done what Mom did. It was enormous to make that journey. Not to have fear. For her, it might have been in her head, ‘Who cares anymore?’ ” In the dark streets of the martyred town, Mrs. Zenoune taunted those who had taken her child.

“You killed Amel. Come and kill me.”

Eye-to-eye with the terror she had felt over the previous terrible years, that night she defied it. When she got home, she threw open her door that was always bolted shut. “Let them enter.” Khalti Houria continued denouncing the murderers on the balcony of the family home well into the early morning hours when the neighbors got up for Zuhour, or Ramadan breakfast. “Ya haggar.” (You who are unjust.)

“You killed her because she was studying. She was beautiful. She was better than you. Amel, Amel, Amel.” After her jeremiad, the gendarmes came and told her husband that the rest of the family should leave Sidi Moussa immediately.

They buried Amel and left their lives behind them.

One of Amel’s younger sisters, Lamia, later overcame her own despair and went to law school in Amel’s memory, practicing today in Algiers, as her older sister hoped to. “Fundamentalism will not win, even if they say, ‘Allahu Akbar’ all day long,” Khalti Houria swears.

Lamia the lawyer takes me into the small, neat living room to see Amel’s framed portrait, which hangs on the wall. The law student had pitch-black hair that fell just below her shoulders, and luminous dark eyes that are now the centerpiece of this room. She was not smiling when the picture was taken, but her determined expression displays what her classmate Adnane Bouchaïb had told me about her: that she had both the eloquence and the lively personality needed to be a successful lawyer. “She had a big future in front of her,” Adnane recollected.

Somehow, in the portrait on the living-room wall, Amel looks both serene and entirely aware of what her future might actually hold. Her face captures perfectly something she said to her mother not long before her murder. “Mom, please put this in your head. Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah. But if something happens to us, you and Dad, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. You and Father must keep your heads high.”

Amel’s watch stopped at 5:17, but she lives on in Algeria and everywhere else women and men continue to fight fundamentalism, by striving for knowledge, and by keeping their heads held high.” FIND BOOK HERE

PUBLISHER:
W. W. Norton & Company
Hardcover ISBN: 9780393081589
Kindle ISBN: B00AV7JV5W
Epub ISBN: 9780393240658

 
FIND KARIMA HERE:

Professor Karima Bennoune – Rutgers School of Law-Newark

Karima Bennoune | The Guardian

Karima Bennoune – Profile – Al Jazeera English

 
 

A Celebration of Women™

welcomes this woman of strength into our global alumni with open arms, anticipating future collaboration in the quest of human rights through the collective action of all women, as one woman.

 
 

 

Brava Karima!

Original 2013- Up-dated 2022