Author Ali Mazrui to Talk about Islam and the West, March 24

Author Ali Mazrui will discuss relations between Islam and the West during the next Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture at Rochester Institute of Technology on Thursday, March 24.

Mazrui will present “Has a Clash of Civilizations Begun? Islam and the West” in Webb Auditorium in the James E. Booth Building on the RIT campus. He is the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at State University of New York at Binghamton. Mazrui is the author of Cultural Forces in World Politics, The African Predicament and the American Experience: A Tale of Two Edens, and Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization among other books.

Following the talk will be a discussion led by Paul Grebinger, Gannett lecturer and coordinator of Senior Seminar at RIT, and Amit Ray, assistant professor of language and literature in the College of Liberal Arts at RIT.

Mazrui’s lecture is the first Gannett lecture of the spring quarter and will be followed on April 14 by a talk by Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America.

“The two lectures were scheduled as an extended debate on the same issue,” Grebinger says. “Mazrui and Pipes have opposing points of view. Anyone with an interest in the dynamic relationship between Islam and the West is encouraged to attend both lectures and participate in the Q-and-A that follows.”

For more information call 585-475-2057 or visit www.rit.edu/gannettseries, where the lecture will be available online.