Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is an Iraqi-born human-rights activist, writer, and satirist who was admitted to the United States as a refugee in 2013. He is founder of Global Conversations and Ideas Beyond Borders and formerly worked for Movements.org to assist dissidents in closed societies worldwide.
Biography
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar was born in Hillah, Iraq, in 1991. He later moved to Baghdad. Al Mutar grew up in a religiously moderate Muslim family in Iraq, though he remained nonreligious throughout his upbringing. He described growing up under Saddam as being exposed to the "motherlode of misinformation". Al Mutar's writings and secular lifestyle made him a target for threats and attacks by al-Qaeda. He survived three attempted kidnappings. His brother and cousin were also killed by al-Qaeda in sectarian violence there. Al Mutar visited Lebanon and then Malaysia where he founded the Global Secular Humanist Movement in September 2010 "with the mission of addressing the absence of recognition and legal protections for secular humanists." As a result of his activism, Al Mutar received death threats from religious militias such as the Mahdi Army and elements tied to al-Qaeda. Due to his conflicts with Islamists over his secular identity and the deaths of his brother and cousin in sectarian violence, Al Mutar fled Iraq and received refugee status in the U.S. in 2013. After first living for a number of months in Houston, Al Mutar moved to New York City., where he lives and continues to operate Ideas Beyond Borders with the broader aim of making Wikipedia pages, academic articles and seminal works covering science, literature and philosophy available to Arabic speakers in attempt to confront lies with logic and pit critical thinking against propaganda and fake news. He also served as a community manager for Movements.org, a platform which "allows activists from closed societies to connect directly with people around the world with skills to help them." In 2017 Al Mutar and Singaporean journalist Melissa Chen founded Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that works to: "promote the free exchange of ideas and to defend human rights... to counter extremist narratives and authoritarian institutions." "Less than 1% of internet content is available in Arabic, rendering much of Wikipedia’s trove unusable. In 2017 Mr. Mutar, then a refugee living in New York, wanted to change that. He founded the nonprofit Ideas Beyond Borders and has since hired 120 young people across the Middle East to translate Wikipedia pages into Arabic, starting with subjects they thought were most needed: female scientists, human rights, logical reasoning, and philosophy." The effort is referred to as House of Wisdom 2.0 and is organized by the I Believe in Science group: "I Believe in Science has more than 300 volunteers and has translated over 10,000 articles. Its founder, Ahmed al-Rayyis, now organizes the translation team for IBB, and many of those volunteers have since been hired as Bayt al-Hikma translators."
Personal views
He criticizes those like Noam Chomsky who attribute unrest in the Middle East in part due to United States foreign policy. Al Mutar attributes the rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban to Islamism which he says will make terrorism difficult to eradicate by U.S. military force alone. He cites the easy availability of funding as a compounding factor. Al Mutar believes that the Middle East is responsible for enforcing peace in their region. He says the West's inflated sense of moral responsibility, which he calls “the racism of lower expectation,” erodes the Middle East's imperative to address its own issues, such as the Syrian refugee crisis. Al Mutar is a critic of the term "Islamophobia." He says use of the term has been broadened by some on the left to include legitimate criticism of Islam. He differentiates between criticizing ideas and criticizing people. Al Mutar criticizes what he sees as an "unholy alliance" of the regressive left and the Muslim right against the secular or liberal Muslims, which he says applies different moral standards to Muslims. Al Mutar criticized President Donald Trump's executive order suspending admission of immigrants for putting refugees "in harm's way." Al Mutar is a columnist for Free Inquiry.
