Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat is wielding his pen once more. According to news reports, the famous cartoonist, who suffered a severe beating in August, has regained 90 percent of the movement in his hands, which were deliberately targeted by his attackers before they dumped him on the side of a road.
Ferzat is renowned in the Arab world for his caricatures of authoritarian leaders. At the time of his assault, CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney took note of “the calculated crushing of something seemingly so fragile but actually so powerful as the hand that holds a pen.”
Currently in London where a gallery is showing his work, Ferzat told the BBC that the uprising in his country has yielded a new “revolutionary art” in what people are writing, drawing, and singing. “It’s unleashed a new creativity among ordinary people — allowing them to speak and express themselves in ways they never could before,” he said.