Summary of MFI Activities in 2007

December 2007

• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad spoke on "Perspectives on Palestine: 'The Land is Our Mother'" on a panel George Washington University.
• We were interviewed by PressTV on the crisis in Pakistan.
  
• Dr. Ahmad and Ali Abuzakouk appeared on pressTV’s The American Dream” to discuss the news coverage of the Canadian girl killed by her father.
• We were interveiwed by Radio Free Europe on habeus corpus rights and on the CIA destruction of evidentiary tapes.
  
• We were interviewed by CKUT  radio in Ontario on the meaning of the Muslim pilgrimage.
• Prof. Peter Bechtold wrote a guest blog giving the "Background for Sudan’s Baffling Teddy Bear Storm."
• Dr. Ahmad wrote a blog “Come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem!” (Offer may not apply to Palestinian Christians)
• Alejandro Beutel wrote a blog on "Torture Revisited – The Case of Abu Zubaydah, Waterboarding and Kiriakou.”

November 2007

• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad participated in a conference for progressive Muslims in Germany sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Dr. Ahmad challenged the conference panelists to define a "progressive Muslim." At the conclusion of the conference it was suggested that a progressive Muslim is one who "uses the past in service of the Future."
  
• MFI Program Assistant Alejandro Beutel presented paper “Sunni Structural Puritanism” at AMSS UK conference in London, UK
• Dr. Ahmad was interviewed on "The Scholar's Chair" television program on Ibn Khaldun's theory of how bad policies, including interventionist economic policies, bring about the fall of civilizations.
• We spoke with editors, reporters and journalists from the Ukraine hosted by the State Dept. to discuss "Objectivity in Reporting on Diversity Issues."
• Dr. Ahmad wrote a review of Graham Fuller's new book The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World for The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.
  
• Alejandro Beutel delivered four presentations on basic Islam, US counterterrorism policies, contemporary Islamic religious authority, and Islam and contemporary global politics at Hartford University.
• Dr. Ahmad met with the head of the Rumi Forum to discuss common goals and interests.
• We were interviewed by Farspress on Elbaradi's report on Iranian compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
  
• We were interviewed by El Mercurio for our perspective on the Annapolis conference on Palestinian-Israeli peace.
  
• Dr. Ahmad wrote an article on  Islam for the Cato Institute's Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.
• We provided commentary to a doctoral candidate for a dissertation on the movement for "gold trade payment arrangements."
• Sarah Swick wrote a blog on her trip to Saudi Arabia.
  
• Alejandro Beutel reported on his talk on "Breach of Law, Breach of Security: A Muslim American Analysis of US Counterterrorism Policies" at the AMSS conference.
• Dr. Ahmad wrote blogs on  "The Naked Ugliness of Grand Jury Abuse: Ashqar Gets Eleven Years for Refusing to Spy for Israel," "The Betrayal of Islamic Law by Its Self-Appointed Guardians."

July 2007

• We participated with a wide variety of other Muslim-American groups in the development of an initiative to help end the sectarian violence in Iraq. One immediate concrete result was the proposal of a code of honor for Muslims in dealing with other Muslims.
  
• We were interviewed by Pam Constable of the Washington Post on the crisis in Pakistan.
  
• We were interviewed by Monaza Siddiqui of Radio Germany on female genital mutilation.
• We were interviewed by Canada's Caravan radio program on the  vulnerability of women in Iraq.
• We provided material for an American University student film project on Immigrant Voices about cross-cultural marriages in the Muslim community.
• We reviewed two books on Islamic law for DOMES (Rudolph Peters's Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century and Muhammad Baqir Al-Sadr's Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence: According to Shi`i Law.)
• Alejandro Beutel argued the importance of diplomatic engagement with Hamas and reported on his recent participation in the International Humanities Conference in Paris as guest blogs for the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. (The post is also reproduced here and here, respectively, on the MFI blog.)
• Alejandro Beutel reported on the "DHS Roundtable on Security and Liberty: Perspectives of Young Leaders Post 9-11."

June 2007

• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad gave a presentation on "The Influence of the Physical Science Paradigm on the Social Sciences: the Transition from Social Engineering to Rules-based Simulation" at the 2007 Metanexus conference on "Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Knowledge: Beyond the Science and Religion Dialogue."
  
• We were interviewed by the Uzbeki service of Voice of America on reform of the Muslim world.
• We were interviewed by El Mercurio (Chile) on what's next in Palestine/Israel?
• We were interviewed by Fars Press on  President Bush's poll ratings and the connection to administration policies.
  
• We met with Dr. Hassan Bousetta from the Universite de Liege in Brussels to consult on his research on Muslim integration in Europe.
• We were interviewed by Alex Serotin of Radio Free Europe on the poetry by Guantanamo detainees.
  
• Dr. Ahmad is among the one hundred scholars refuting the interpretation of Islamic law that that apostasy is a capital crime.
  
• We posted the edited transcript of our annual dinner on "Challenges to Objective Media Coverage of Islam and Muslims" with Caryle Murphy, Nadia Charters-Bilbassy and Alison Weir, as well as audio files of the event.
• Dr. Ahmad's article on "Islamic environmentalism" will be included in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Islamic Economics.
• We met with Syed Kamall (British Muslim member of the EU Parliament) on the formation of an international network of Muslim libertarians.
  
• The Children of Abraham and Aristotle seminar held its concluding discussion of Dr. Ahmad's book Signs in the Heavens.

April 2007

• MFI Program Assistant Alejandro Beutel presented a paper on "The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood--a Preliminary Assessment of Its Positions on Religious Freedom, Women, and Religious Minorities" at the eighth annual conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy at George Washington University.
• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad attended a CATO discussion on "Egyptian Economic Reform" where he emphasized the need for the development of a large, prosperous, and empowered middle class in order to insure social justice and economic liberty in Egypt.
• The transcript of Anwar Ibrahim's presentation on "The Importance of Free Markets to Islam and Muslims" is now available.
  
• We participated in a discussion of Dr. Ahmad’s Signs in the Heavens at a meeting of the Children of Abraham and Aristotle.

March 2007

• Over sixty people attended the Minaret of Freedom Institute annual fundraising dinner at the Clarion Hotel Bethesda Park in Bethesda. The program featured a discussion of "the Challenges to Objective Media Coverage of Islam" featuring journalists Caryle Murphy (author of Passion for Islam, recently retired from the Washington Post), Nadia Bilbassy Charters (senior Washington Correspondent at Al Arabiya covering the White House and the State Dept.) and Alison Weir (of IfAmericansknew.org).
• Our program on Sunni -Shia relations was noted and MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad  was quoted in Pamela Constable's Washington Post article on Sunni-Shia relations
  
• Syed Kamall, British Muslim Conservative Party member of the European Parliament visited the Minaret of Freedom Institute as part of our brown bag luncheon series. Among other issues, Minister Kamall discussed the obstacle to Muslim integration and renaissance posed by the welfare state.
• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad attended a CATO discussion on "Escaping the Iraq Trap" where he responded to an observation that the intrenecine violence spawned by the invasion would probably get worse upon withdrawal of the American forces with the observation that delay of that withdrawal could conceivably aggravate the violence even further, a point to which speaker Ted Galen Carpenter readily assented.
• We were interviewed by the Muslim Link newspaper.
  
• We were interviewed by Alex Sarotin of Radio Free Europe on the status of the Guantanamo detainees and on the possibility that the Guantanamo detention center could be shut down.
• We met with representatives of the U.S. government and other representatives of the Muslim community in a workshop at the Institute for Defense Analysis on the engagement of  the Muslim Community with the American government.
• The first of a two-part discusion of Imad ad-Dean Ahmad's book, SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: A MUSLIM ASTRONOMER'S PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION AND SCIENCE (second edition) was held at the Children of Abraham and Aristotle monthly salon.
  
• We were interviewed for a Ph.D. dissertation on religious accommodation.

February 2007

• MFI presented a dialogue on Sunni and Shi`a Differences (Distinguishing the Real from the Imagined) at American University featuring Sulayman Nyang (Howard University) and Imam Abo Fazel Nahidian (Mannassas Mosque). MFI President Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad gave the introduction and moderated the discussion.
  
• We participated in a round-table discussion of Prof. Louis Cantori's presentation "The Islamic Paradigm as a Conservative Research
  Paradigm." We presented the argument that Islamic thought is more compatible with the Jeffersonian than the Hamiltonian position.
• We were interviewed by Radio Free Europe's Alex Sarotin on the significance of  the British redeployment of forces from Iraq to Afghanistan.

January 2007

• MFI president Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad presented the Muslim view on the topic "Religion, Fundamentalism and the perceived Crisis of Modernity" in a panel discussion for The Bowie Clergy Association at the Christian Community Presbyterian Church in Bowie Maryland.
  
• We paid tribute to the work of economist Milton Friedman at a brown bag luncheon by exploring the role Islamic civilization played in establishing non-state schools and colleges through the civil society sector and the controversy over such institutions today called "Free to Choose Madrassas."
• We gave an interview to Alex Sarotin of Radio Free Europe on the application of the death penalty in Iraq.
• We posted four original blogs on "Was the Timing of Saddam’s Execution a Sectarian Declaration of War?" "Strategic Redeployment vs. “Surge” and (Not) Engaging Iran and Syria",  "Frank Talk from Shirin Ebadi on U.S. - Iranian Relations", and "Breach of Law, Breach of Security – NSA Wiretapping."