Five years after September 11th, vast quantities of ink and analysis had been devoted to Western-based efforts to either uncover or challenge American exercises of power in the Middle East. Yet the other side of the equation – the various forms of Middle Eastern resistance to the era's Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos on the one hand and deployments of human rights and democracy rhetoric as pretext for military interventions in the region on the other – has largely gone unnoticed. Despite being at times entangled in local governments' or opposition forces' more self-serving rebukes of American policies, currents within Middle Eastern civil society endeavored to pose a variety of challenges to the United States' contradictory human rights course in the post–September 11th era. As a result, for the first time in their recent history, Americans were conscious of an intense returned Middle Eastern gaze in the human rights field. Through its focus on the Middle Eastern answer to American human rights transgressions and appropriations, this chapter provides a glimpse into yet another dimension of the reconfiguring of global human rights' geography that has been onging since September 11th – the addition of mobilizations, challenges, and critiques directed from the Middle East to the United States to the preexisting West to East traffic.

MIDDLE EASTERN INITIATIVES CHALLENGING AMERICAN HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

Prior to September 11th, American and Middle Eastern human rights exchanges generally followed a set itinerary closely adhering to broad precepts and assumptions of the East/West geography of human rights.