The Arab uprisings have unleashed fraught issues around identity and national sovereignty. Within the struggles for a better future, opportunism and sectarian politics run rife. Amid suffusing uncertainty, some yearn for despotism or the old stability of Western colonialism.

Although the events have given way to many movements, activists that oppose the hydra of Western intervention, despotism, and sectarianism that confronts the Arab world are rare. Ibrahim Sharif, a Bahraini opposition figure, is a prominent exception. And, manifestly, a dangerous one: he is currently in prison, having been tortured, and facing the remainder of a five-year sentence. His plight has barely registered beyond Bahrain’s shores, but there is no better story than his to illustrate the complexity of this necessary fight.

Sharif was born on May 15, 1957, the ninth anniversary of the Nakba  — which saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from historic Palestine  — and the establishment of the state of Israel. His birthplace was Muharraq, the second-largest island in the Bahraini archipelago, and at that time the hub of political opposition to British colonialism. Sharif’s home was in Steeshan, a lower-middle-class neighborhood deriving its name from the English word “Station,” after the old central bus station that used to be located at the top of the neighborhood.