Bridging the Islam-West Chasm

Location:
Room C25 - Harper Center, Graduate School of Business

Contact:
K. Rizwan Kadir
847-414-1583
kkadir@chicagoGSB.edu

Description:
The Pakistan Club at the Chicago Graduate School of Business is proud to host a talk by Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy, titled "Bridging the Islam-West Chasm".

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy is chairman of the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, where he has taught since 1973. He received his bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, master's in solid state physics, and Ph.D in nuclear physics, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of the Abdus Salam Prize for Mathematics, the Baker Award for Electronics, Faiz Ahmad Faiz Prize for contributions to education in Pakistan, and the UNESCO 2003 Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science. He has been a visiting professor at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Maryland, Stanford Linear Accelerator, and often lectures at US and European universities and research laboratories.

He has appeared on several TV and radio networks (BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR, Fox) to analyze political developments in South Asia.


In 1988, Dr. Hoodbhoy produced and anchored a 13-part television series in Urdu, Rastay Ilm Kay, broadcast weekly by Pakistan Television, that comprehensively reviewed and analyzed the problems of education in Pakistan. These included issues of standards, admissions, and student violence in universities; curriculum matters; distorted representations of adversaries in history books; the problem of ghost schools and teachers; etc. This led to the award of the Faiz Ahmed Faiz Award in 1990. In 1998, Oxford University Press published a book edited and partly authored by Dr. Hoodbhoy, the first that comprehensively analyzed the state of education in Pakistan. Between 1999-2000, he was a member of Educational Advisory Board, Government of Pakistan, a body that was empowered to make structural changes in primary and secondary education.

He also heads a body to oversee the conversion of his university from the British model to the US model of higher education.

Some of Dr. Hoodbhoy’s newspaper articles on education are listed below and may be found at www.chowk.com, a Pakistani website.

Select Publications

Islam & Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, published by ZED Books, London, in 1991 with translations in Turkish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu.
Education And The State – Fifty Years of Pakistan, published by Oxford University Press, 1998.

This event is free and open to the public.
Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact the event sponsor for assistance. For student events, please contact ORCSA at (773) 702-8787.