One specific example is the work we have been doing to promote the empowerment of women in the Middle East and North Africa. The lives of Arab women today are complex, diverse and far more multi-faceted than those of the one-dimensional creatures of veiled passivity who inhabit the imaginations of so many Western “experts.” In most Arab countries, women face constricting laws and social customs that hold them back from full participation in their societies. Some, as a result, lead lives of passive submission. But others rage against those institutional obstacles, organise other women to challenge male domination of their public and private lives, and seize every opening, large or small, to move the rights of women at least that one next step.