Many Arabs are taking to the streets – on two wheels, no less – to demand human rights in a region plagued by war and need.
Cycling initiatives are multi-pronged initiatives: they raise money and awareness, inspiring others to do the same, while promoting healthy living that minimizes your carbon footprint.
Here are 7 remarkable times Arabs cycled for change:
1. Cycling4Gaza
Founded in 2009, the initiative mobilizes people from all over the world to raise funds for non-profit organizations that provide healthcare and educational support to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Their first challenge was a ride from London to Paris, which 27 cyclists completed in three days, raising some $100,000 for emergency healthcare projects in Gaza.
Apart from raising funds, the group seeks to raise awareness about the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip.
The international initiative includes cyclists from Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The cyclists act as volunteers serving charitable projects of their choice.
Last year, Qatar’s GBI team raised the funds needed for the Cyclists for Education project, which built a secondary school for girls in Gaza.
In a war-torn, fuel-deprived and conservative Yemen, Bushra Al-Fusail gathered some countrywomen and decided to go cycling – an unseemly act for women in the country.
She started a women-only cycling group that caused a ripple effect, inspiring similar initiatives around the Arab World.
The aim is to “cycle for freedom, for movement, for justice, and for our lives.”
“Nothing will stop us from moving around, not bombs nor social taboos.”
The movement prompted an outpouring of criticisms from Yemeni society, ultimately pushing Al-Faisal to leave the country .
4. Amna Suleiman’s cycling group
A group of four Palestinian women became the first to pedal in public since the Islamist Hamas movement came to power in the Gaza strip, restricting women's participation in sports.
33-year-old Ms. Suleiman tells her cyclists, according to New York Times, "You are young. I want you, when you get married, to make riding your bikes a condition of marriage.”
“My pain is temporarily, saving a child is forever,” said the Lebanese cyclist Micky Chebli who biked from Paris to Beirut on his 50th birthday.
His project raised $300,000 that were distributed to three NGOs, one serving education for children, another for hospitalization and a third for drug-abuse prevention and rehabilitation, according to Sport961 .
This year, a cycling group memorialized the Palestinian Nakba in an incredibly powerful way.
The Nakba is when 700,000+ Palestinians were dispossessed to make room for Israel's creation. Israel has barred future generations of Palestinian refugees from returning to their ancestral homeland. To remind people of this ongoing policy, a group of cyclists calling themselves Heartbeats to Palestine rode for more than 200 km, from Lebanon's northern Nahr al-Bared camp, to the borders of historic Palestine. They could cycle no further at that point, and it was a powerful reminder of both the Palestinian will to return and the enormous barriers that stop them from doing so.
The cyclists were Palestinian, Lebanese, South African, German, and British and they rode for two days straight. They visited Palestinian camps along the way, writing posts on social media as they made their way, reminding the public about severe restrictions to movement that refugees face.