Dr. Munawar Anees - Muslims and Global Enlightenment—Partners or Pariahs?

The fate of the Muslim world is inextricably linked to both the basic development of the Islamic East and the continued growth of the industrialized West. In this audio, Dr. Anees stresses the need for intellectual, economic, and cultural reform within Islam and for greater tolerance and understanding from the West. His insightful, balanced and pointed critique of both represents an important step in building a better bridge between them.

BIO

Dr. Munawar Anees is a Pakistani-American writer and social critic, with an enduring interest in religion and science discourse, bioethics, and Islamic philosophy. He is the founder of the world's premiere journal on Islam and the Muslim world: Periodica Islamica. Through his writings and speaking engagements, Dr. Anees has become a leading progressive social and scientific voice in the Islamic world. In 2002, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Anees is author of half a dozen books and over 300 articles, book reviews, and bibliographies, published in international scholarly journals. His book Islam and Biological Futures: Ethics, Gender, and Technology (1990), brought the problems of surrogate motherhood, abortion, and genetic engineering to the forefront of contemporary discourse across the Muslim world. He has contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. He is a founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, an advisory editor of the Journal of Islamic Science, and is the Islamic and Arabic Studies section editor for Ultimate Reality and Meaning. Since February 1998, he has served as a contributing correspondent for the Global Viewpoint/Los Angeles Times Syndicate. For the new global online encyclopedia, Nupedia, he was selected in 2000 as the editor for the religion section.

Anees received his doctorate at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. He is an elected member of the Royal Academy for Islamic Civilization Research, Amman, Jordan, and UNESCO's select group of 40 international scholars, Intellectuals of the World. From 1991 to 1998, he served as an advisor to the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, and now works as a consultant for the John Templeton Foundation. He is an American citizen currently living in Paris with his wife, Nadia, and their two children, Aisha and Omran.