Professor Bennoune Publishes Interview with Slain Activist
Professor Karima Bennoune has published an interview with Pakistani human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud on the website Open Democracy as a tribute to the slain arts promoter and advocate. Mahmud was assassinated on April 24, prompting Open Democracy to publish the full-length interview, which was conducted in December 2010 in Karachi and excerpted in Professor Bennoune's acclaimed book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism. In the interview, Mahmud discusses the founding of The Second Floor (T2F) café and the role it has played in facilitating public discourse of various social issues in Pakistan. She also explained the threats she faced in her work, saying "I stand up for what I believe in, but I can't fight guns."
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.