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10 of TIME's 100 'most influential'

What does it mean to be influential today? TIME Magazine may not have a scientific answer, but they identified scores of people in their 2012 “100 Most Influential People in the World” list, released this week. Here is a sampling of 10 people from around the world who made the cut.

Samira Ibrahim, marketing manager

  • By Whitney Eulich Staff Writer

Best known on the international stage as a plaintiff in Egypt’s “virginity test” case this year, Samira Ibrahim is an outspoken activist, fighting for respect for women’s rights. In the midst of protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square last year, Ms. Ibrahim and six other female protesters were arrested and subjected to a “virginity test” in a military prison. Ms. Ibrahim sued the military, and in December the practice was ruled illegal. Months later, a military court exonerated the doctor charged with administering the tests, causing what Ibrahim called a threat to women’s rights by both the military and Islamists.

“It takes a strong person to stand up for what is right in the face of ostracism and public scrutiny,” said Charlize Theron, who wrote Ibrahim’s entry for TIME. “Samira represents the model of how to stand up to fear, and the impact she has made reaches far beyond Egypt.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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