The Muslim-cultural Students Association will host a series of events on issues ranging from feminism in Islam to the Bush Administration’s military tribunals as part of its 15th annual Islam Awareness week, which begins today.
Looming over the week is the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas. McSA has already announced a panel discussion on the issue for Wednesday, tentatively including Ali Abunimah, the co-founder of the Web site “Electronic Intifada,” Dr. Michael Vicente Perez, senior editor of Islamica Magazine and Sheikh Muhammad Amin. The panel replaces an event on Islamic finance planned before the fighting erupted.
The group’s leaders felt that the issue was too important to ignore, said McSA co-president Dana Shabeeb.
“Most of the executive board felt that it was more pressing to have an event about Gaza,” the Weinberg junior said. “We might have (the finance panel) later on, but we felt that it was more pressing to help students understand the context of the crisis.”
The featured event this year will be a lecture on Thursday in Ryan Auditorium titled, “Guantanamo Bay on Trial: Toppling the President’s Terror Tribunals,” given by Neal Katyal, professor at Georgetown Law. Katyal was the lead plaintiff’s counsel in the 2006 Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the court found that the Bush administration’s military tribunals violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as the Geneva Conventions.
McSA will also sponsor two firesides, one given by Prof. Ruediger Seesemann on the links between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the other given by spoken word artist Tasleem “Jamila” Firdausee on feminism and Islam.
Firdausee was selected for the feminism fireside because of her personal experience with Islam, Shabeeb said.
“She has a pretty interesting perspective in that she converted to Islam and can talk about how that empowered her as a woman,” Shabeeb said.
The focus on world events this year rather than on Islamic culture does not reflect any change in the primary message of Islamic Awareness Week, Shaheeb said.
“What is culture?” she asked rhetorically. “Culture and politics and history are all related to each other.”
