Mr. Faisal Niaz Tirmizi has served as the Consul General of Pakistan, Chicago (USA) since September, 2013. His lecture will review the history of Pakistan/US relations, highlighting mutual strategic and economic ties between the two nations while assessing the current state of Pakistan/US .

Mr. Tirmizi is a post graduate of the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad and School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He joined the Foreign Service of Pakistan in 1993. Mr. Tirmizi has handled bilateral, multilateral, consular, and administrative assignments both in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and abroad. He has served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Desk Officer of Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan, India, as well as Director of Personnel, Protocol, and Foreign Secretary's Office. Mr. Tirmizi has held various diplomatic assignments in Pakistan Mission's abroad in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (1996-1999), Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland (2003-2007), and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (2007-2010).

Yemen Symposium

4 Panelists will discuss the current situation in Yemen

Prof Mohammad Ayoob will discuss the international politics behind the crisis 

Summer Issawi will share personal/familial accounts

Professor Russell Lucas will discuss domestic politics

Professor Reza Nassiri will discuss the health crisis in Yemen 

Prof. Christiane Gruber's Visual Culture of Islam course from the University of Michigan as part of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC).  

Christiane Gruber's primary field of research is Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written two books and edited a volume of articles. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts and codicology, having authored the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume of articles, The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern Islamic visual culture and post-revolutionary Iranian visual and material culture, about which she has written several articles. She also has co-edited two volumes on Islamic and cross-cultural visual cultures. She is currently writing her next book, titled The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images.

Guest Lecturer Dalia Mogahed

Dalia Mogahed is the Director of Research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, where she leads the organization's pioneering research and thought leadership programs on American Muslims. Mogahed is former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, where she led the analysis of surveys of Muslim communities worldwide. With John L. Esposito, she co-authored the book Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. President Barack Obama appointed Mogahed to the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009. She was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about U.S. engagement with Muslim communities. Her 2016 TED talk was named one of the top TED talks that year. She is a frequent expert commentator in global media outlets and international forums. She is also the CEO of Mogahed Consulting.

Muslim Journeys Book Club: American Islamophobia by Khaled Beydoun.

Discussion with Nazita Lajevardi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science

The term "Islamophobia" may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia's roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system?

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump era. He passionately argues that by failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry endorsed and emboldened by law and carried out by government actors, U.S. society ignores the injury it inflicts on both Muslims and non-Muslims. Through the stories of Muslim Americans who have experienced Islamophobia across various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Beydoun shares how U.S. laws shatter lives, whether directly or inadvertently. And with an eye toward benefiting society as a whole, he recommends ways for Muslim Americans and their allies to build coalitions with other groups. Like no book before it, American Islamophobia offers a robust and genuine portrait of Muslim America then and now.

This conference will explore not only the physicality of Arab cities or the sociality of Arab urban environments, but also the place of the urban in Arab history, philosophy, literature and the arts.

This conference will explore not only the physicality of Arab cities or the sociality of Arab urban environments, but also the place of the urban in Arab history, philosophy, literature and the arts.

This conference will explore not only the physicality of Arab cities or the sociality of Arab urban environments, but also the place of the urban in Arab history, philosophy, literature and the arts.

Education Under Siege: Attacks on Scholars and Scholarship in Turbulent Times

We are witnessing today what many scholars characterize as the collapse of the post-Cold War liberal order—with serious consequences for Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries as well as for those living in minority communities around the world. The collapse is marked by intensifying violence between state and non-state actors, by deepening social, economic, and environmental crisis, and by the reemergence of autocratic and despotic rule as viable and desirable forms of governance. Political, ethnic, and religious minorities are suspect, and political and economic refugees are viewed as clear and present dangers. In this new world (dis)order, academia is but one of the casualties. This is witnessed by the attack and scapegoating of scholars and their scholarship as threats to national solidarity, economic prosperity, and/or state security.  Such attacks take on different modes of repression and violence depending on the nature of the conflict and the strategies available to those state and non-state actors who see themselves as arbiters of national or communal order. In this context, scholars have suffered intimidation, firings, arrest, exile, and assassination. Schools and institutions of higher education have been defunded, besieged, closed, and violently attacked. Scholarly research and curriculums deemed contrary to the moral fabric of society or to the larger national interest have been denounced, censored, and/or outlawed. Taking "Education Under Siege" as the theme of this conference, we suggest a focus on the following areas: