The Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui and Hubert Maury, translated by David Homel
In Islamabad in 2018, Pakistani investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui is kidnapped at gunpoint and barely escapes being killed. He flees the country on the first plane to France with questions left unanswered: What motivated the attack? Was the tyrannical Pakistani military involved?
The Dissident Club is an action-packed graphic memoir about Islamic politics, complex family dynamics, and one man's dedication to truth and principle. With illustrator Hubert Maury, Siddiqui, winner of the prestigious journalism award Prix Albert Londres, tells the story of his intriguing life and career, beginning with his childhood in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan under the stern gaze of a fundamentalist Islamic father.
Siddiqui rebels against his religion, but his personal freedom is constrained by strict Islam, especially after his father joins a jihadi mosque.
Following the Gulf War and then the shock caused by 9/11, Siddiqui enters university and begins his personal emancipation. He becomes a journalist, but as he reveals the crimes of the Pakistani military, he learns the hard way that journalists are moving targets. Once in Paris, he opens the Dissident Club, a bar dedicated to helping political dissidents from around the world.
An expansive Pakistani coming-of-age story, The Dissident Club documents Siddiqui's experiences as a young man fighting for truth and justice against the harsh backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism and corruption.
(From Arsenal Pulp Press)
The Dissident Club is available in April 2025.
Taha Siddiqui, an award-winning Pakistani journalist living in exile in Paris, has worked for many international and local media outlets that include the New York Times, The Guardian, France 24, Arte, the Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera.
Hubert Maury is a graphic novel writer and artist, and The Dissident Club is his first graphic work published in English.
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