‘The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East’
MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, and a member of MESH. His new is book is The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.

From Joshua Muravchik

When I would tell people that I was writing a book about Middle Eastern democrats, the reaction was invariably the same: “That will be a short book.” This jibe expressed the common knowledge that the region remains stubbornly autocratic.

The fact that there is precious little democracy in the Middle East does not mean, however, that there are no democrats.
(Snip)

Depressing book in what these people are going up against. Uplifting in that they have the courage to do it.