Omid Safi, an Islamic scholar and member of the progressive Muslim movement in the U.S., will speak at Grand Valley State University.
Safi will speak at 7 p.m. on January 17 in the Loosemore Auditorium of the DeVos Center on Grand Valley's Pew Grand Rapids Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
Safi is an associate professor of Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes on contemporary Islamic thought, and medieval Islamic history. He is the also the chair for the study of Islam at the American Academy of Religion, the largest international organization devoted to the academic study of religion. Safi was born in the U.S., but has spent half of his life living in Muslim countries like Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and India. His family originally comes from the city of Esfahan in Iran. His understanding of religion is shaped both by the pluralistic Sufi dimension of Islam as well as the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. He witnessed the Iranian revolution and the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war personally and is committed to exploring possibilities of nonviolent struggle within the Islamic tradition.
He is the editor of the volume "Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism" (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003). In this volume, he brought together 15 Muslim scholars and activists to imagine a new understanding of Islam which is rooted in social justice, gender equality, and religious/ethnic pluralism. His book "Islam and the Politics of Knowledge," which deals with medieval Islamic history and politics, was published by UNC Press in 2006. He has written three books, more than 30 articles and some 75 encyclopedia entries and book reviews.
