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<TITLE>3/15 You Don't Know Us: Voices from the Moderate Muslim Majority</TITLE>
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<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:17.0px'><B>The Ford Hall Forum Free Public Lecture <BR>
and Discussion Series presents<BR>
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<B>You Don’t Know Us: <BR>
Voices from the Moderate Muslim Majority<BR>
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</FONT></SPAN><FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:16.0px'>with<BR>
<B><U>Ali S. Asani </U></B><U>and <B>Mona Eltahawy<BR>
</B></U>moderated by <B>Jeff Jacoby<BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:16.0px'>Thursday, March 15, at 6:30-8:00 pm<BR>
at the<BR>
Old South Meeting House <BR>
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<B>-FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC-
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The world’s 1.4 billion Muslims encompass an enormous range of beliefs and practices, a world of cultures—from Arab to post-Soviet to Indian to American, and a wide spectrum of movements—from liberal progressive to Islamist. However, today’s headlines all too often highlight the familiar stories of violence and extremism within the Islamic world. Is religion truly the driving force behind these actions? Where is the space for voices of the moderate majority to be heard? In our country, where many became acquainted with Islam only in the context of September 11th, how can we better understand this major world religion? Tonight, Prof. Ali Asani and Mona Eltahawy explore the tensions within modern Islam and how we can better understand them. <BR>
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</U><B>Ali S. Asani</B> is currently Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture at Harvard University. He is also a member of the board of directors of the American Islamic Congress as well as the Academic Council of Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. <B>Mona Eltahawy</B> is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. <B>Jeff Jacoby</B> is an op-ed columnist for <I>The Boston Globe</I>. <BR>
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<SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'><FONT FACE="Arial"><U>Come join the conversation.<BR>
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The <B>Ford Hall Forum</B> promotes freedom of speech and fosters an informed and effective citizenry through the public presentation of lectures, debates, and discussions. Its events illuminate the key issues facing our society by bringing to its podium knowledgeable and thought-provoking speakers, including some of the most controversial opinion leaders of our times. These speakers are presented in person, for free, and in settings, which facilitate frank and open debate. As the nation’s oldest free public lecture series, it has a storied past as a venue for some of the most intriguing figures in our nation’s modern history, including Maya Angelou, Isaac Asimov, Alan Dershowitz, W.E.B. DuBois, Stephen Jay Gould, Al Gore, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Cokie Roberts, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Malcolm X, to name just a few. <BR>
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The Ford Hall Forum presents this program in collaboration with the <B>Old South Meeting House</B>, as part of their Partners in Public Dialogue Series. Old South Meeting House is a non-profit museum and historic site, located on the Freedom Trail, dedicated to sustaining the building’s tradition as a community-gathering place for the free exchange of ideas and to provide a place where people can connect the issues of the past with the issues of today. It receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, and other public and private sources. Visit www.oldsouthmeetinghouse.org for more information.<BR>
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</I><B><U>Additional biographical information:<BR>
</U></B>Born in Nairobi, Kenya, <B>Ali S. Asani</B> is currently Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture at Harvard University. He also serves on the faculty of the Dept. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, offering instruction in a variety of languages such as Urdu/Hindi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Swahili as well as courses on various aspects of the Islamic tradition. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Islamic Congress as well as the Academic Council of Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. Besides his various language courses, he also directs the university's Ph.D. program in Indo-Muslim Culture and teaches numerous courses within the program. His books include, among numerous others, <I>Celebrating </I>Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Muslim Devotional Poetry (co-author); <I>Al-Ummah: A Handbook for an Identity Development Program for North American Muslim Youth</I>; <I>Ecstasy and Enlightenment</I>: <I>The Ismaili Literature of South Asia</I>. In addition to his books, he has published numerous articles in journals and encyclopedias including <I>The Encylopedia of Religion</I>, <I>The Oxford Encylopedia</I> <I>of the Modern Islamic World</I>, <I>Encylopedia of South Asian Folklore</I>, and the <I>Muslim Almanac</I>. He also serves on the editorial advisory board of the <I>Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World</I> and the <I>Encyclopedia of Islam in the United States</I>. <BR>
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<B>Mona Eltahawy</B> is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. Her essays make her one of only a few writers whose work appears regularly in both the Arab and U.S. media. Her opinion pieces have appeared frequently in the <I>International Herald Tribune</I>, <I>The Washington Post</I> and the pan-Arab <I>Asharq al-Awsat</I> newspaper and she has also published opeds in <I>The New York Times</I>, the <I>Christian Science Monitor, Egypt's al-Dostour</I> and Lebanon's <I>Daily Star</I>. She recently became a columnist for the major Danish daily Politiken and the online commentary site www.saudidebate.com. Over the past year, she has lectured and taken part in conferences across the United States as well as in Canada, Denmark, Dubai, Egypt, Greece, Ireland, Morocco, The Netheralands and Qatar. Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters and she reported from the region for <I>The Guardian</I> and <I>U.S. News and World Report</I>. Since she moved to the U.S. in 2000. She has been a guest analyst on <I>ABC Nightline, PBS Frontline, BBC TV and Radio, The Doha Debates, CNN, Al-Arabiya, Al-Hurra, MSNBC, VOA, Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor</I> and various NPR shows. She was born in Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel and is currently based in New York. She is a board member of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. <BR>
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<B>Jeff Jacoby</B> (moderator) is an op-ed columnist for <I>The Boston Globe. </I>Before joining the <I>Globe</I> in 1994, he was the chief editorial writer at <I>Boston Herald</I>. A native of Cleveland, Jacoby graduated with honors from George Washington University in 1979 and from Boston University Law School in 1983. He practiced law for a short time at the firm of Baker & Hostetler, but returned to Boston to become deputy manager of Ray Shamie's 1984 campaign for the US Senate. From 1985 to 1987, Jacoby was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, who at the time was president of Boston University. In addition to his print work, Jacoby has been a political commentator for WBUR-FM, Boston's National Public Radio affiliate. For several years he hosted "Talk of New England," a weekly television program, and has often appeared as a panelist on WCVB-TV's "Five on Five." He is an overseer of the Huntington Theatre Company, the largest resident theatre in Boston, and is on the board of <I>The Concord Review</I>, a quarterly journal of essays on history by secondary students worldwide. <BR>
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