November 17, 2009

Islam and Liberal Democracy: How Tradition Matters

The Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Berkley Center are sponsoring a seminar with leading scholars to address how tradition matters in Islamic political thought today.

Please join us for a wide-ranging discussion of how the Islamic tradition - including the Qur'an, the life and sayings of the Prophet, and diverse legal schools - relates to the idea of a liberal democratic state.

Moderator: Jane McAuliffe, President, Bryn Mawr College

Abdullahi An-Na'im, Visiting Professor, Georgetown University
Sherman Jackson,, Professor, University of Michigan
Ebrahim Moosa, Professor, Duke University
John Esposito, Professor, Georgetown University

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is a Visiting Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for the fall 2009 semester. He is on leave from his position as Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, where he focuses on cross-cultural human rights issues, with an emphasis on Islam. A native of Sudan and human rights activist, An-Na'im places the Qur'an and the development of the Islamic tradition in its historical context and examines their implications for our contemporary thinking about justice and the state. He is the author of Toward an Islamic Reformation(1990), African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam (2006) and Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (2008). At Emory, he directs projects on Women and Land in Africa and Islamic Family Law, and a Fellowship Program in Islam and Human Rights. An-Na'im holds LL.B. degrees from the University of Khartoum and the University of Cambridge, and earned his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Edinburgh.

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