So-called progressive university professors tend to have it out for liberals. Swinging hard and broadly, for a full blown rant against Arab liberals, here’s a piece by Joseph Massad, which you can read here at Electronic Intifadah. Included are the Nobel winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian-American sociologist and human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the most important seat of Muslim learning in the Sunni world, artist poet and writer Gibran Khalil Gibran, and, more broadly, the political  liberal opposition to the Assad regime in Syria, Lebanese supporters of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, assassinated by Syria and/or Hezbollah  in 2005, Salam Fayyad and other Palestinian supporters of a 2ss. According to Massad, of course, they are the ones all responsible for the devastating poverty and wars across so much of the Arab world today. Reading against the grain, I’d recommend Massad’s article for providing a tight map of major actors, living and dead, who hold out hope and progress, reason and dialogue between cultures.