The International Studies Public Forum and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS) present

"Crescent and Dove: Civil Unrest and Nonviolence in the Middle East Uprisings"
with Qamar-ul Huda, U.S. Institute of Peace

Thursday, October 6, 2011
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100

Qamar-ul Huda is a senior program officer in the Religion and Peacemaking Program and a scholar of Islam at the U.S. Institute of Peace.  He is an adjunct associate professor in Georgetown University's Conflict Resolution Program where he teaches religion, ethnicity, identity and conflict resolution to graduate students. He has taught Islamic studies and comparative religion at Boston College, College of the Holy Cross and Brandeis University.  His areas of interest are Islamic intellectual history, ethics, comparative religion, the language of violence, conflict resolution and non-violence in contemporary Islam. His edited book, The Crescent and Dove: Peace and Conflict Resolution in Islam (USIP Press, 2010), provides a critical analysis of models of nonviolent strategies, peace building efforts, and conflict resolution methods in Muslim communities. His current research is on Christian-Muslim relationships in conflict zones, and on comparative Sunni-Shi’ite interpretations of social justice, ethics, and post-conflict reconciliation. He has examined the production of religious knowledge, the diversity of religious practices and religious thought, and peacemaking in Islam. His earlier book, Striving for Divine Union: Spiritual Exercises for Suhrawardi Sufis (Routledge) examined the theological, political, and social dimensions of the celebrated Suhrawardi Sufis from Iraq to South Asia. He served as the guest editor to The Journal of Peacebuilding and Development for the special issue on Islam and peacebuilding. He served as the guest editor to The Muslim World Journal for the special issue on Qawwali politics, poetry and performance. He has published articles on comparative ethics, inter-faith dialogue, religious peace building, rituals, and mysticism in several journals.  He earned his doctorate from UCLA in Islamic intellectual history, his B.A. from Colgate University, and he studied in Islamic seminaries overseas.

For more information about the ISPF, please visit   http://internationalstudies.ss.uci.edu/is_public_forum or email mroesler@uci.edu.