I have never travelled further from New York than Western Europe; Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an advocate of democracy imprisoned in Egypt. But Saad and I are both outlying members of the same sprawling Midwestern family: Saad is married to my first cousin Barbara. His name is much in the news and on the op-ed pages these days, if you're looking out for it. A year ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a photo of Saad on its cover, in which he is seen peering from between his courtroom cage-bars. But even such prominent items can be lost in the dispiriting muddle of Middle Eastern politics, so hard to keep in view amid yellow-alert warnings of poison-gas attacks, or alongside sniper headlines which further convince our fear-stupefied Western selves that anyone called Muhammad has a predisposition to run amok.

LRB 12 December 2002 | PDF Download