COLORADO

A critical dialogue on one of the most vexing questions of our time, between two leading scholars, Ramin Jahanbegloo and Nader Hashemi

Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (2009), which Seyla Benhabib of Yale University has called a “thoughtful and erudite examination” of “some of the most difficult questions of our times” and Khaled Abou El Fadl of UCLA has called a “masterful contribution” that “has succeeded in raising the bar and in setting a new standard of critical analysis in the field.” Hashemi is co-editor, with Danny Postel, of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2011) and The Syria Dilemma (2013). He is also co-editor, with Fawaz Gerges, of The Middle East Today book series published by Palgrave Macmillan. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail (Toronto), among other outlets, and he is frequently interviewed by the BBC, PBS, NPR, CNN, and Al Jazeera.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is York-Noor Visiting Chair in Islamic Studies and Associate Professor in Political Science at York University in Toronto. He was awarded the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association in Spain (UNA) and is an advisory board member of PEN Canada. He has been a Professor of Political Science and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto, the Rajni Kothari Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, a researcher at the French Institute for Iranian Studies, and a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is one of the founders of the journal Goft-o-gu (Dialogue) in Tehran and worked on the magazine Esprit in Paris. He is the author of many books, including:

Time Will Say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison

Introduction to Nonviolence

The Clash of Intolerances

The Gandhian Moment

Democracy in Iran

The Spirit of India

Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Talking India: Conversations with Ashis Nandy

Beyond Violence: Principles for an Open Century

In Search of the Sacred: A Conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on His Life and Thought

As head of the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran, he brought a stream of Indian, European and North American intellectuals to lecture in Iran, serving as a kind of philosophical ambassador between Iran and the outside world. In April 2006 Jahanbegloo was arrested in Tehran and charged with plotting a ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Iran and placed in solitary confinement for four months.

This event is co-sponsored by the Political Theory Forum at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

It is free of charge and open to the public.

Lunch will be provided.