ensaf haidar

A Wife’s Lonely Fight for Her Husband

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A review of Ensaf Haidar’s excellent new book about her life with Raif Badawi

* * * *
How does a young mother tell her children that their father—her husband—is in prison for writing what he thinks in a fundamentalist country that oppresses freedom of thought and freedom of expression? How does she tell her children that their father was taken from them because their country punishes thinkers and writers? How does she tell them he was taken from them?

There is no instruction manual for that situation. The moment in which a young mother must live through exactly this moment is only a brief scene in Ensaf Haidar’s newly published memoir of life with and apart from her husband, the writer Raif Badawi, but it is painful to read, because Ensaf (and her co-writer Andrea C. Hoffmann and their skilled translator Shaun Whiteside) bring the reader into the room with her and the children and invite us to feel their terror and confusion.
Read More

How to Be Brave

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Bravery is a skill. I do not know if I have cultivated it in myself.

A young man sits today in a prison, awaiting a death sentence to be carried out, possibly this Friday. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 when he was 16 or 17 years of age (both ages have been reported), making him a juvenile at the time of his arrest. He was arrested at a protest. His country is Saudi Arabia, and the protests in 2012 in other autocratic nations in that region had been effective in fostering change. At trial, he was not given access to the “evidence” amassed against him, in no small part because there was no such evidence. He was convicted, no joke, of stealing every gun and every uniform from a local police station, single-handed.
Read More

Speak out for Those Who Can’t

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Love takes many different shapes and travels many different roads. Love of family. Love between two who believe each to be the other’s everything. Love of truth and of truth-telling, no matter the price.

There are individuals around the world who are in prison cells right now, or are being secretly executed right now, because they told the truth about the power arrangements in their nation and told the world that they live in a country that believes in punishing and sometimes killing those who have revealed these things. And yet they have gone ahead and written these things anyway at the risk of joining the ranks of the punished, joining the silent brigades of the killed. This is a love for the truth that I sincerely believe will never be tested in my heart in my lifetime, so I have no clue if I will ever have an opportunity to display the matchless courage that Raif Badawi, his powerhouse wife Ensaf Haidar, his brother-in-law Waleed Abulkhair, or Waleed’s wife (and Raif’s sister) Samar Badawi display every damn day that Raif spends in jail (as of today, 1103 days) and Waleed spends in jail (more than a year now).

Raif and Waleed are in jail; their wives work every day to keep their names in the public square.
Read More