#MLTalks Event Addresses Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Islam
Join the conversation with Intisar Rabb, Manal Omar, and Ethan Zuckerman
The latest series of #MLTalks continues at 1–2:30 pm on Wednesday, October 19. This is a free, public event: You can take part in-person at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts; or, whether you’re near or far, you can follow along via the live webcast and tweet your comments and questions on Twitter using the hashtag #MLTalks.
Ethan Zuckerman, head of the Lab’s MIT Center for Civic Media, will moderate a discussion with two people whose life and work focus on Islam and how it affects civil and human rights: Manal Omar, associate vice president at the US Institutes for Peace, and Intisar Rabb, professor of law at Harvard. Ethan, who is an advisor to Intisar’s SHARIAsource project, says her passion is in explaining what Islamic law is and is not. Manal is a writer and human rights advocate known for women-focused views of Islam.
At the #MLTalks event, he plans to talk with Intisar and Manal about whether it’s fair that people often see Islam and women’s rights as opposed. He’ll try to pick apart the ways in which deeply discriminatory and sexist local cultures get mapped onto Islam. He’ll also ask them to articulate their visions for Islam and who gets to represent it.
Manal Omar is the associate vice president for the Middle East and Africa Center. Previously, she was regional program manager for the Middle East for Oxfam — Great Britain, where she responded to humanitarian crises in Palestine and Lebanon. She worked with Women for Women International as regional coordinator for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. She also served as an international advisor for the Libya Stabilization Team in Benghazi in 2011. She was named among Top 500 World’s Most Influential Arabs by Arabia Business Power in 2011 and 2012, and among the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World by Georgetown University and The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in 2009. In 2007, Islamic Magazine named her one of the ten young visionaries shaping Islam in America. Manal wrote the celebrated book Barefoot in Baghdad about her experiences in Iraq during the US invasion.
Intisar A. Rabb is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, and director of its Islamic Legal Studies Program: SHARIAsource. She also holds an appointment as a professor of history and as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has published the monograph Doubt in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press 2015), an edited volume, Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and articles on Islamic constitutionalism, Islamic legal maxims, and on the early history of the Qur’an text. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.
This promises to be a lively and important conversation. Feel free to join in at the MIT Media Lab or via the live webcast, which will be live-captioned. We shall also provide audio assist devices for those attending in person — for more information, please email events@media.mit.edu. And we welcome you to submit questions in advance and during the discussion, via Twitter using the hashtag #MLTalks or in the Facebook Live comments. We’ll make every effort to address your questions and comments.
