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Since his time as a student until the end of 1970, Ahmed Mansour’s views on Islam have stirred controversy. During the study and teaching at the Egyptian Al-Azhar University, Dr. Mansour antagonized two national and religious challenge of the interpretations of the Koran and violence against the enemies of Christians in Egypt. Therefore, the censorship and violence, followed Mansour during his academic career, starting with the claim that he failed two-thirds of his dissertation in 1980. In all seven of his 21 books were banned.Finally, in 2001 - after him, his family, colleagues and received death threats - Mansour fled to the United States, where he was granted political asylum. There, with the help of the Scholar Rescue Fund, Mansour certainly has a grant from the Harvard University Law School, so that in order to complement a research project on the Wahabi doctrine of Islam - an extremist Sunni sect - United States.

Ensuring a refugee in a university scientists in a safe country is precisely the task of the Scholar Rescue Fund was established to demonstrations.

The group is a project of the New York-based Institute of International Education, also supports the reputation of the Fulbright scholarship program. The Scholar Rescue Fund, which two years ago, helps scientists their victims in other countries until it is safe to return home.

Since the First World War, the charitable groups, such as the scientists have Mansour at war or conflict intense, but the Scholar Rescue Fund is working on a different schedule. The group was established to provide safeguards to the intellectuals at the time of danger.

The fund, the science to leave the countries where they might find death threats, censorship, or freedom penalty. Often, their ideas are controversial or impression of their governments to threaten the status quo.

The goal is not permanently delete these thinkers their own country, but they help in the search for safer positions education abroad simply to tensions at home.

The scientists have come to the support based on the seriousness of their situation and the quality of their work. The grants are usually for a year by appointment, with longer maturities, in some cases.

Around 50 people from over 20 countries since the Fund was established in 2002.

Other groups - such as the United States, Scholars at Risk Network and the British Council by the organization to support the teaching of refugees - to help scientists like Mansour internships.

But only the Scholar Rescue Fund provides financial support, usually half of the individual remuneration for the year with the University host, of whom the others.

The fund is also unique, as a researcher on the ground in the world - the positions in France, Norway, South Africa and Mexico. “There is no doubt that some of these awards were made to save lives,” says Robert Quinn, director of the Fund. “All of them were savings career.”

A century of protection of scientists

Scholar Rescue has been practiced in various forms for nearly a century. One of the first to do so, he was active at the international level’s World Student Christian Federation.

If the students and teachers lost their homes and livelihoods situation to create the basis of the First World War, the group responded by clothing, books, food and shelter. Later, in the years before the Second World War, the International Institute for Education’s Emergency Committee of displaced persons, with foreign scientists and the New School for Social Research at the intellectuals again in danger of the ‘Hitler’s Germany.

The Committee urgently was dismantled after the war, but the institute will continue to help scientists around the globe in moments of danger, as the Soviet occupation of Prague in 1968, China’s Tiananmen massacre, and the “ethnic cleansing” in ex - Yugoslavia.

But that was not always able to help them when the events moved too quickly.

“The problem with this model, they have come to see, especially after [Slobodan] Milosevic in Yugoslavia, is that if you wait until the crisis comes, you are after the game, if you try, l ‘ To help people, “says Quinn.

During the Second World War, the mediation had an advantage is that the world is moving slowly. They were very early on, what had happened to Albert Einstein, Churchill warned against the dangers of Nazism during his visit to Britain in 1933. Einstein University Library refugees supported by the emergency and other organizations.

But today, the turning of conflicts around the world faster, the institute noted that it is better infrastructure, at any time. This led to the founding of the Scholar Rescue Fund in 2002