RJIL Fall 2007 Symposium
Regent Journal of International Law
A forum for a Judeo-Christian perspective on International Law.
“Islam, Democracy, and Post-9/11 Nation Building” |
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Dr. Vali Nasr
Nasr is one of the world's leading experts on the Islamic world and Muslim politics. He has advised senior policy makers, members of Congress, and leading executives in the private sector. As a consultant to the Department of State and USAID, he has provided expert testimony to the US Senate on the Muslim world, and is a major influence on ongoing public debates on such critical issues as Islam and democracy, Islamic extremism and anti-Americanism, America's relations with Iran, and the war in Iraq.
A Professor and Associated Chair of Research at the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Nasr is the author of several important books on politics and Islam, most recently,
Democracy in Iran and The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future. He has written for The New York Times, TIME, and The Washington Post, and is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, 60 Minutes, NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline.
Nasr's singular understanding of conflicts within Islam and their potential global effects has not gone unnoticed: he has been awarded grants from the MacArthur Foundation, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC and author of the bestselling The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism (Doubleday). His latest Doubleday release is titled Is It Good For the Jews? The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, his extensive and authoritative writings on the phenomenon of Wahhabism established him as one of the leading global experts on Islam, its internal divisions, and its relations with other faiths.
Mr. Schwartz has also developed, among Westerners, a unique position as a confidante of Shia Muslim religious leaders and intellectuals, notably with Iraqis as well as Shias living in the U.S. His investigative reporting on Islamist extremism has led to repeat appearances on Fox News as well as on such leading TV shows as MSNBC Dateline and Hardball and CNN’s Talk Back Live.
His articles have been printed in the world’s major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, theToronto Globe and Mail, and many more. He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, as well as to the New York Post and Reforma in Mexico City, and leading periodicals in the Balkans.
He has been a student of Sufism since the late 1960s and an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997.
Dr. Radwan Masmoudi
Radwan A. Masmoudi is the Founder, member of the Board, and President of the Center of the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID), a Washington-based non-profit think tank. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s quarterly publication, Muslim Democrat.
He has written and published several papers on the topics of democracy, diversity, human rights, and tolerance in Islam.
He is very active with local Muslim organizations, and was elected as Director of the Muslim Community Center, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Dr. Masmoudi was also a Founding Member and President of the Tunisian Scientific Society (TSS).
Dr. Masmoudi has a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in robotics, automation, and control. He has worked for eight years as a research engineer, senior research engineer, and advanced control engineer. In 1999, he won the prestigious George Olmsted Award for his research on: “Rapid Prediction of Effluent Biological Oxygen Demand for improved environmental control”.
Dr. Masmoudi was born in Tunisia in 1963 and immigrated to the United States in 1981. He is married, and has four children.
Mehrangiz Kar
Mehrangiz Kar was born in 1944 in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz, Iran. She studied at the Department of Law and Political Science at Tehran University.
Before the Iranian revolution, Kar was active in the Iranian press, writing for such publications as Ferdowsi magazine on a wide variety of social issues of the day. Kar had just passed the bar exam and been licensed to practice law when the Islamic revolution took Iran by storm in 1979. The new government hardly recognized women working outside of the home, much less women working as judges or as lawyers. Over time, however, she was able to resume her practice, and her cases ranged from adultery and divorce to human rights abuses carried out at the hands of Iranian officials.
Until the year 2000, Kar continued to write articles for the nascent reformist press as well as such publications as the pioneering monthly women’s review Zanan. A common theme throughout her work was the tension between the law on the books and core principles of human rights and human dignity. Throughout this time, the conservative press and the establishment blackened her reputation at every opportunity, accusing Kar of importing foreign ideas, Western vice and beyond.
In 2000, she and sixteen other Iranian journalists, activists and intellectuals attended a conference in Berlin; Kar’s remarks about the urgent need for constitutional reform in Iran and on secularity in particular earned her censure back home. Upon return to Iran, she was arrested and taken to Evin Prison, leveled with various charges, from “acting against national security” to “spreading propaganda against the regime of the Islamic Republic.” Kar was to be additionally tried on charges of “violating the Islamic dress code at the Berlin Conference,” “denying the commands of the shari‘a” and abusing sacred principles. On 13 January 2001 she was convicted and sentenced to four years imprisonment on charges of acting against national security and disseminating propaganda against the Islamic regime.
Following two months spent in prison, doctors learned that Kar had developed cancer. Under pressure from the European Union and the government of Holland in particular, she was released temporarily for treatment in the US. Two months later, her husband was arrested on charges of being a spy for America, an adulterer, and working for the Shah’s regime and funneling funds from the US to the reformist press. Today, he is out of Evin on regulated medical leave, alternating between the hospital and his home. His prison sentence is outstanding.
Kar, in the meantime, remained in the US getting treatment, while in 2002, her criminal sentence was reduced to six months. In 2002 she was awarded the Ludovic Trarieux Prize in recognition of her life’s work and in 2004 was honored by Human Right First. She has served a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the American University in Washington DC, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Columbia University. Most recently, she was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and is currently based at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has also been recognized as a Scholar at Risk through an international network of universities and colleges working to promote academic freedom and to defend the human rights of scholars worldwide.
Kar has written a memoir and is currently at work on publications surrounding human rights and constitutionalism in Iran. She has written many articles (in both Farsi and English) and published at least fifteen books.
Dr. Joe Kickasola
Extensive training in linguistics and ancient languages brought Dr. Joseph N. Kickasola to teach public policy at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University as Professor of International Affairs. He served as a pastor from 1961 to 1966, and as Professor of Old Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary from 1971 to 1985. He holds degrees from Houghton College, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Brandeis University (Ph.D. in Egyptian hieroglyphics and Coptic). His teaching specializations include international affairs in the Middle East as well as Biblical languages (especially Hebrew and Aramaic) and Biblical law. He has published various articles and tapes on Biblical and theological topics, especially on the relevance of Biblical law to current affairs. In 1993 he published an article entitled Kissing the Son: The Tragedy of the Conscience, the Crescent and the Cross.
Since 9/11/2001, based on his knowledge of Islam and written Arabic, he has spoken widely on Islamic politics (e.g., at USNORTHCOM, and the Pentagon).
Professor Jennifer Jefferis
Jennifer Jefferis came to Regent University from Boston University, where she is completing a Ph.D. in Political Science. She specializes in Middle Eastern politics, religion in social movements, and international relations. She is currently exploring the relationship between religion and political violence, endeavoring to identify circumstances under which religious social movements will use violence to pursue their political goals. She has spent time researching and studying Arabic in Egypt.
Gen. John H. Johns, ret.
General Johns served 26 years as a combat arms officer, retiring in 1978 as a brigadier general. He served in command positions up to Assistant Division Commander of the 1st Infantry Division and held numerous staff positions, including 8 years on the Army General Staff, culminating his career as Director, Human Resources Development.
In 1960, General Johns began a series of assignments focused on counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine. He was on a committee at the Special Warfare School in 1961 that developed the first Counterinsurgency course, went to Vietnam in 1962, where he was senior advisor to the Vietnam Political Warfare School, and returned to serve in a series of staff positions on the Army General Staff. During these staff positions, General Johns focused on the nation-building role of the U.S. military. His recommendations were distributed as policy guidance for the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and curricula. The one recommendation that was rejected was that U.S. combat forces not be used in counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam; he argued that the U.S. role should be limited to advisory duties. While serving in the office of the army chief of staff, he served on a committee that monitored war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam.
After retirement and a tour as a deputy assistant secretary of defense, General Johns served for 14 years as a professor of political science at the National Defense University (NDU), where he taught National Security Strategy and National Security Decision-making and regional studies of Latin America. After retiring from NDU in 1996, Dr. Johns taught courses on Ethics and the U.S. Constitution at the Federal Executive Institute until 2005. In October 2001, he taught a one-week ethics course for the 21 senior officers of the Omani Air Force; the fourth day was on international terrorism.
He is currently the Washington Area coordinator for seminars conducted by the National War College Alumni Association. He participates in an internet chat group that focuses on national security issues. The group membership of over 250 consists of scholars, senior retired and active military officers, media representatives, and policymakers throughout the government.
General Johns is a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College, the National War College, and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He has masters' degrees in psychology and international relations, and a doctorate in sociology.
Dr. Thomas Najjar
Dr. Najjar comes from a Sunni Muslim background in an Arab Middle Eastern country, where he was educated in a conservative Islamic school system. He came to the US to obtain his college education, culminating in a Ph. D. degree in engineering at MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Dr. Najjar has had an extensive career in the forefront of critical energy issues, and continues as an internationally recognized authority on energy policy and related topics. In his long professional career, he developed a major academic research and educational program at Georgia Tech, and started a consulting corporation in his fields of expertise.
Dr. Najjar became a Christian believer after many years of comparative study of both the Bible and the Qur’an. In his search he investigated the historic movements to “reform” or otherwise “modernize” Islam and concluded that reforming Islam is a futile endeavor because of its built-in parameters within the sacred text of the Qur’an and Sunnah and its interpretation by authorized scholars.
Consequently, he came alongside other former Muslims who are active in Christian ministry to organize and present seminars designed to inform and bring the Church up-to-date in her awareness of the Islamic challenge—such challenge being not only to the Church, but to our political and economic system here in the United States.
Starting in 1998, the group organized a series of seminars under the title, “The Challenge of Islam in the 21st Century,” and “The Many Faces of Islam,” that were carried out at major churches and Christian institutions. Aside from providing in depth training on the intricacies of Islam and its socio-political and economic strategies, the seminar participants were exposed to the predictable Islamic terror threats as contained in early media appearances by fundamentalist leaders well before the actual events in Nairobi and Dar Al-Salaam leading to 9/11.
Dr. Najjar became a regular lecturer at the “Perspectives to the World of Islam” series since 2003. Also currently a contributor and an editor for a series of booklets, books and manuscripts authored by Sam Solomon, Islamic expert and Christian apologist.
