It is with great honor that IQSA acknowledges two new lifetime members and one new institutional IQSA member as of January 2019.
IQSA welcomes the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (CMJE) as its inaugural institutional member. CMJE is a tripartite partnership of the Hebrew Union College, the Umar Ibn Al-Khattab Foundation, and the University of Southern California.
IQSA’s two new lifetime members include Farid Esack (former IQSA president) and Ghazala Anwar (Starr King School for the Ministry).
Farid Esack is a South African scholar of Islam and public intellectual who completed the Darsi Nizami in traditional madrasahs in Karachi, Pakistan, and his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK. Since 2000, Esack has been teaching at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where he is Professor in the Study of Islam and head of its Department of Religion Studies. In addition to serving as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in the first South African democratic government (appointed by President Mandela) and heading a number of leading national and international not-for-profit entities, he has taught religion, Islamic Studies, and Qurʾanic Studies in South Africa (University of Western Cape, Cape Town and UJ), Europe (Universities of Amsterdam and Hamburg), the United States (College of William and Mary, Union Theological Seminary,Xavier University, and Harvard Divinity School) and in Asia (International Islamic University of Islamabad and Gaja Mada University in Yogjakarta).
Ghazala Anwar (PhD Comparative Religion,Philadelphia) is a Pakistani American scholar of Islamic Studies. She is currently Associate Professor of Quranic Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry. Her focus has been on feminist/queer inclusive and animal inclusive contemporary readings of the Qurʾaninformed both by modernist and traditional as well as contemporary Western approaches of reading theQurʾan and Sufi intentionality. She is now turning her attention from interpretation of the text to the history of its formation as this new field emerges.
As a reward for their investment, lifetime members enjoy benefits in perpetuity. To accommodate the different levels of our members, IQSA offers five membership tiers starting 2018. We encourage all scholars and students in the field to consider renewing their membership or to become IQSA MEMBERS NOW.
On behalf of the Board of Directors and Standing Committees, IQSA offers a warm welcome to CMJE, Farid Esack, Ghazala Anwar, and all incoming 2019 IQSA members.
© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2019. All rights reserved.