Director, Institute for Peace Studies and
Conflict Resolution, Mumbai
Dr.
Radwan A. Masmoudi
President, Center
of the Study of Islam & Democracy
Dr.
Imtiyaz Yusuf
Malaysia Chair of Islam in
Southeast Asia, GeorgetownUniversity
Tuesday, 20 April 2010, 2:30-4:30pm
Please join us for
the launch of Stimson’s publication, Muslim
Indians: Struggle for Inclusion. Joining us in addition to the author, Amit
A. Pandya, will be advocate Irfan Engineer,
Director of the Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution in Mumbai,
Dr. Radwan A. Masmoudi, President of the Center of the Study of Islam &
Democracy, and Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf, Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at
the PrinceAlwaleedBinTalalCenter for Muslim-Christian
Understanding at GeorgetownUniversity.
The publication
draws on work conducted since December 2007 by Stimson and the Institute for
Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution to better understand and describe the
priorities, thinking, and concerns of Muslims. We have conducted focus groups
in 14 cities and hundreds of interviews throughout all quarters of India.
Our interlocutors have represented a wide range of professions and economic
status, and the widest possible variety of sectarian identities and religious
and political ideologies.
The Muslim
community in India
is, with notable exceptions, disproportionately poor and uneducated, and
suffers impediments in access even to the scant social resources available to
the poor. It also suffers from increasing hostility in popular attitudes,
discrimination at the hands of police and other officials, biased educational
curricula, tendentious views of history, and the consequences of cultural
incomprehension. Although Muslims in India have for the most part
remained patriotic and loyal, there is a looming sense within and outside the
community that the sense of marginalization—and the insecurity born of
discrimination and bias—could soon result in unmanageable sources of grievance
and instability.
Despite the fact
that the Muslim Indian population is almost as great as the entire population
of Pakistan and greater than
that of major predominantly-Muslim nations such as Bangladesh
and Egypt,
Muslim Indians remain relatively ill-understood and under-studied. Their
preoccupations and predicament are little-known among outsiders and non-Muslim
Indians. There is even a sense among Muslim Indians themselves that they do not
have a handle on what is happening in the very varied Muslim communities
throughout India.This represents a particular blind spot for US
security policy, given its interest in understanding the increasingly
transnational character of the security challenges posed by the development of
violent and militantly anti-state Islamist ideologies.
Amit
A. Pandya is Chief of Staff
at the International Labor Affairs Bureau of the US Department of Labor. He
served between 2007 and 2010 as Director of the StimsonCenter’s
Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges
project. Pandya is a South Asia expert and international lawyer. He has been
Counsel to the Government Operations and Foreign Affairs Committees of the
House of Representatives, and held senior positions at the Departments of
Defense and State and at the US Agency for International Development. He has
also practiced law and worked in various civil and human rights nonprofit
organizations, and was formerly an ethnographer and teacher.
Irfan
Engineer
is Director of the Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution (IPSCR)
in Mumbai. The Institute was established in January 2007 under the aegis of the
Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai. The overarching goal of the
Institute is to create enabling conditions for peace and security by: creating
awareness in the society of factors affecting peace; addressing myths
attributed to religious teachings; research and study into communal and
sectarian conflicts; capacity building and peace advocacy, especially among
youth; and, supporting women’s empowerment. Mr. Engineer is a prominent social
activist and advocate and is also the Associate Editor of the IndianJournal
of Secularism.
Radwan
A. Masmoudi is Founder and
President of the Center of the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID), a
Washington-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting freedom,
democracy, and good governance in the Arab/Muslim world.He has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the
Center’s quarterly publication, Muslim Democrat. Mr. Masmoudi has written and
published several papers on the subjects of democracy, diversity, human rights,
and tolerance in Islam. Mr. Masmoudi has
also written and published several articles on these subjects and has appeared
on CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, Algerian TV, and MBC. Mr. Masmoudi has a Masters
and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr.
Imtiyaz Yusuf is currently Visiting Associate Professor and Malaysia Chair of Islam
in Southeast Asia at the PrinceAlwaleedBinTalalCenter for Muslim-Christian
Understanding at GeorgetownUniversity. He has been
living in Thailand for the last
21 years and is Program Director of the Department of Religion at AssumptionUniversity
in Bangkok, Thailand. Dr. Yusuf has contributed
to the Oxford
Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (2009); Oxford Dictionary of Islam
(2003); Encyclopedia of Qur'an (2002); and Oxford Encyclopedia of the
Modern Islamic World (1995).
