Dr. Mohammad Ali Shomali of Qom, Iran to deliver lecture entitled, “The Impact of Christian-Muslim Relations on World Peace”
A revered Muslim scholar will give a public lecture exploring Christian-Muslim relations at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) this month.
Dr. Mohammad Ali Shomali, Founding Director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies (IIIS) in Qom, Iran, will present the lecture, entitled, “The Impact of Christian-Muslim Relations on World Peace,” at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, March 30. Shomali will speak in Marpeck Commons (2299 Grant Ave.). Admission is free, and all are welcome.
“We are excited to host Dr. Shomali at CMU,” says Dr. Harry Huebner, Director of International and Inter-Faith Theological Initiatives at CMU. “He has a deep commitment to peace, justice, love, and mercy. It will be interesting to hear him speak on the significance of the relationship between Christians and Muslims on world peace.”
A successful teacher and an engaging storyteller, Shomali is a graduate of the Islamic Seminaries of Qom, and also holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran. He earned his PhD from the University of Manchester in the UK and wrote his doctoral thesis on ethical relativism.
In addition to his work with the IIIS, Shomali is the Director of London’s Islamic Centre of England.
Shomali’s visit stems from an ongoing relationship between Shi’a Muslim scholars from Iran and Mennonite scholars from Canada and the U.S. These scholars first met in 2002 to start an ongoing series of dialogues that aim to improve understanding between Muslims and Christians.
The seventh dialogue is scheduled to take place at CMU in 2017.
Huebner adds that Islam is often misunderstood in the mainstream media, and hearing from Muslims directly is one way for people to explore new perspectives.
The March 30 lecture marks the first time Shomali will make a public presentation as part of his visit to CMU, providing the public with a unique opportunity.
“The news doesn’t give us a good understanding of what Islam is,” Huebner says. “Getting to know people from Iran is one way of cutting across that.”
View a report by Dr. Shomali on the lecture, as appeared in the May 2016 issue of Islam Today, here.
About CMU
A Christian university in the Anabaptist tradition, CMU’s Shaftesbury campus offers undergraduate degrees in arts, business, humanities, music, sciences, and social sciences, as well as graduate degrees in theology, ministry, peacebuilding and collaborative development, and an MBA. CMU has over 800 full-time equivalent students, including those enrolled in degree programs at the Shaftesbury and Menno Simons College campuses and in its Outtatown certificate program.
For information about CMU visit www.cmu.ca.
For additional information, please contact:
Kevin Kilbrei, Director of Communications & Marketing
kkilbrei@cmu.ca; 204.487.3300 Ext. 621
Canadian Mennonite University
500 Shaftesbury Blvd., Winnipeg, MB R3P 2N2
Footage from the public lecture event
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwanj71pM7E[/youtube]
The Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA)’s 8th Annual Conference gets underway this October 1 and 2 in Winnipeg, with Menno Simons College and UWinnipeg’s Global College serving as co-hosts for this important international conference.
Cynthia Enloe’s career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the U.S. Her books and articles have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazine and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. At Clark, Professor Enloe has been selected “Outstanding Teacher” three times and named University Senior Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. In 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies. Enloe’s twelve books include Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2004), and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007). Her newest book is Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (forthcoming from University of California Press, spring, 2010). In years past, Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments’ war-waging policies—and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies.
Marilou McPhedran is an international human rights lawyer, who was appointed principal (dean) of Global College in June 2008, having resigned as the Chief Commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to return to the University of Winnipeg. Born and raised in Neepawa, Manitoba, called to the Bar of Ontario, Dr. McPhedran was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1985 in recognition of her co-leadership in the successful campaign for stronger equality protections in the Canadian constitution. She cofounded several internationally recognized non-profit systemic change organizations, such as LEAF – the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, which has conducted constitutional equality test cases and interventions for 25 years. She is a pioneer in research and advocacy to counter human rights violations through systemic reform – in law, medicine, education and government. She founded the International Women’s Rights Project, located at the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies – based on two of her intergenerational models: “evidence based advocacy” and “lived rights”. As chief executive officer of a federal center of excellence, she directed staff and programs including a cyber research network; she has chaired two public inquiries into the sexual abuse of patients; and she has co-investigated and co-authored a number of research projects on systemic reform and human rights, including: the ten country pilot study to assess impact of the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). As principal of Global College, she coordinates the University of Winnipeg contributions to the new joint Masters degree in Peace and Conflict Studies with University of Manitoba, directs the Institute for International Women’s Rights and the Global Citizenship Program with high school affiliates, lectures and conducts research on international human rights, and has launched a campaign to build the Global Learning Commons. As a volunteer, she is on the Board of the Winnipeg Women’s Health Clinic and is the Vice-President of the Canadian International Council – Winnipeg Branch.
Chief Ovide Mercredi is a Cree, a lawyer, a negotiator, an author, a lecturer in Native Studies, and an activist on behalf of First Nations in Canada. He was born into a traditional trapping hunting and fishing lifestyle in Grand Rapids, Manitoba in 1946. He is currently serving as Chief of the Misipawistik First Nation, Grand Chief of the Swampy Cree Tribal Council, and is also National Spokesperson for Treaties 1 through 11. Chief Mercredi is perhaps best known for his deep involvement in constitutional law reform issues, and Aboriginal and Treaty rights negotiations. He acted as a key adviser in First Nations’ opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, and in 1989 was elected Manitoba Vice-Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He was first elected National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in 1991, and served two terms until 1997. He also led the First Nations negotiations in the Charlottetown Accord. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours. In 2006 he was invested with the Order of Manitoba; the province’s highest honour. He was nominated for the Gandhi Peace Prize and has received honourary degrees from Bishop’s University, St. Mary’s University, and Lethbridge University. He has published a collection of his speeches in a book entitled In The Rapids – Navigating the Future of First Nations, and has contributed articles to two other recent books. He is also the subject of two Canadian documentary films. Chief Mercredi has spoken at hundreds of venues, from small community gatherings to universities and colleges throughout North America and internationally about his experiences.
Catherine Morris has been a leader in the field of conflict resolution since 1983, both in Canada and internationally. Working in academic, community, nonprofit, public, and private sectors, she has played key roles in numerous organizations and initiatives. Ms. Morris is the founder of Peacemakers Trust, a Canadian non-profit organization for education and research in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. As an adjunct professor, she teaches graduate level courses in conflict resolution, negotiation and international human rights at the University of Victoria where she designed and founded a multidisciplinary graduate program in dispute resolution. An Associate and former Executive Director of the university’s Institute for Dispute Resolution, she worked in several leadership roles from 1992-1998. As well at the University of Victoria, Ms. Morris is an Associate of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI). She also regularly teaches at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand and, in the past, has taught at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University and guest lectured at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She is presently Faculty Associate for the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Arthur V. Mauro Centre at the University of Manitoba. Ms. Morris has been involved in design, planning, administration and presentation of workshops for senior public officials, leaders of non-governmental organizations, academics and professionals in several countries including Thailand, Cambodia, Bolivia, and Rwanda. Her research and writing has resulted in publications and papers on mediator ethics and qualifications, conflict and culture, ADR in legal education, the role of religion in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, peacebuilding in Cambodia, human rights education, and reconciliation. Hosted by Peacemakers Trust, her website-based bibliography, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding: A Selected Bibliography has been used by tens of thousands of people in more than one hundred countries on all continents. Ms. Morris’ current interests include possibilities for reconciliation and justice after genocide and massive human rights violations. As a practicing lawyer with Lampion Pacific Law Corporation and a member of the Law Society of British Columbia, the Canadian Bar Association and the British Columbia Mediator Roster (Civil), she is widely experienced in conflict assessment, mediation, fact-finding and adjudication.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1997, Carolyn Nordstrom is an anthropologist at home in lecture hall and war zone alike. She studies wars, the illegal drug trade, gender relationships, and war profiteering. Her research has made her an eyewitness and scholar of worldwide urban and rural battlefields as well as of the shadowy worlds of diamond, drug, and arms smuggling. In addition to her teaching and lecturing, she has written dozens of articles, and several books including Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World; Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the 21st Century; A Different Kind of War Story; Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival, and The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. “I have studied the ways in which people gain the necessities to wage war and create peace, and how people pay for these services,” she once said. “Drugs, precious gems, human labor and sex are routinely used in international black markets to purchase everything from guns and computer-based weapons systems to antibiotics and food. The integrity of my ethnographic research and the safety of those among whom I work have rested on having to delete basic data, which erases the extra-legal from public discourse. I want to develop a form of creative non-fiction that explores the lives of real people working in this complex, extra-legal network without revealing their locations.”
Sherene Razack is professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender issues in the law. Her courses include: ‘Race, Space and Citizenship;’ Race and Knowledge Production’ and ‘Racial Violence and the Law.’ Her most recent book is entitled Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2008). She has also published Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004), an edited collection Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping A White Settler Society Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991). Razack has been described as “one of the most influential thinkers in Cultural Studies in Canada.”
Betty A. Reardon is the Founding Director Emeritus of the International Institute on Peace Education, an annual intensive residential experience in peace education. Since 1982 the IIPE has been held at universities and peace education centers in Asia, Europe, Latin America and Central America. For this work she received a special Honorable Mention Award from UNESCO in 2001. Among her other initiatives in the international peace education movement, she initiated and served as the first Academic Coordinator of the Hague Appeal for Peace Global Campaign for Peace Education. Having taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad, she has 46 years of experience in international peace education and 33 years in the international movement for the human rights of women. She has served as a consultant to several UN agencies and national and international education organizations. Her widely published work in the theory and development of peace and human rights education, and in gender and peace issues, recognized in the awarding of the 2008 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Peace Studies from the Peace and Justice Studies Association, is archived in the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo Libraries. She is the recipient of the 2009 Sean McBride Peace Prize awarded by the International Peace Bureau, the oldest of the many nongovernmental peace organizations, founded in 1891.
Sandra Whitworth is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sandra did her Ph.D. at Carleton University in Political Science (1991), and her first book, Feminism and International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 1994. That book was translated into Japanese and was published by Fujiwara Shoten Press in 2000. Her most recent book was published in 2004 (Lynne Rienner) and is entitled Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. She also adapted Joshua Goldstein’s textbook International Relations for use in Canadian university and college classrooms. She has written various articles and book chapters on issues such as gender in Canadian foreign policy and human rights and was invited (with co-author Dyan Mazurana) to produce the 2002 United Nations Secretary-General Study Women, Peace and Security. That study won one of the American Library Association’s ‘Notable Government Documents Awards’ for 2002. Sandra teaches courses at York in Global Politics, Gender and International Relations, and graduate courses in International Relations Theory. She is serving currently as the home base editor for International Feminist Journal of Politics. Sandra is an enthusiastic (though not particularly skilled) hockey player and thinks the world could be a better place if everybody played the guitar, read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and listened to live music whenever they have a chance.