Dr. Abdou Filali-Ansary of Aga Khan University is eighth Lipset Lecturer on Democracy in the World at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26 at the Embassy of Canada in Washington, DC.
DATE: October 25, 2011
CONTACT: Jane Riley Jacobsen (202) 378-9700 or jane@ned.org
WASHINGTON, DC — The Arab Revolutions: Democracy and Historical Consciousness is the topic of Dr. Abdou Filali-Ansary, who will deliver the 8th annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture.
Sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, the annual lecture is an important new forum for discourse on democracy and its progress worldwide.
Abdou Filali-Ansary is currently a professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University (London), an institution which he served as Founding Director from 2002 to 2009. Previously he had been Founding Director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco, (1984–2001) and secretary-general of Mohammed V University in Rabat (1980–1984), where he also taught modern philosophy.
Dr. Filali-Ansary has written widely on Islam, modernity, democratization, and civil society in the Muslim world, especially on intellectual trends in contemporary Muslim contexts. His books include Is Islam Hostile to Secularism?; Reforming Islam: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates; and a translation from the original Arabic into French of Ali Abdel-Raziq’s landmark book Islam and the Foundations of Political Power. In 1993 he co-founded the bilingual Arabic- French journal Prologues: revue maghrébine du livre and served as its editor until 2005. He is a longtime member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy and a frequent contributor to its pages.
The Lipset Lecture is named for one of the great democratic scholars and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Seymour Martin Lipset’s scholarship on such themes as the conditions for democracy, political parties, voting behavior, extremist movements, ideologies, and public opinion constitutes one of the most prolific, insightful, and widely read bodies of workon democracy ever produced by a single author.
This event is open to the media. Interested journalists should register with Jane Riley Jacobsen at 202-378-9700 or jane@ned.org.
