El murciano-marroquí Benjelloun invitado por la Universidad de Michigan a dar una conferencia sobre la realidad del Islam en España

Paulino Ros
Islam en Murcia, 14.03.13

El departamento de Estudios Islámicos de la Universidad de Michigan (EEUU) ha invitado a Mounir Benjelloun a dar una conferencia en el simposio sobre "El Islam en la España contemporánea" que tendrá lugar mañana viernes 15 de marzo en el campus de la citada universidad.

Mounir Benjelloun (foto: Teresa Martín)

Benjelloun, que es presentado como presidente de la Comisión  Islámica de España (los norteamericanos desconocen que todo lo que se decidió en Leganés el pasado 17 de noviembre está en suspenso despues de los recursos interpuestos por Riay Tatary y CISCOVA), ofrecerá una conferencia titulada "La realidad del Islam en España: diversidad y cambios".

Este es el programa del simposio:

Islam in Contemporary Spain: Identities & Representations
Friday, March 15
10 AM to 6 PM
Forum Room, Palmer Commons
http://www.ii.umich.edu/isp/events/ci.islamincontemporaryspainidentitiesandrepresentationsfri15mar2013_ci.detail

Event description, schedule, and speaker bios below.

Event description:

The international symposium “Islam in Contemporary Spain: Identities and Representations” seeks to examine the promises and challenges facing contemporary Spain’s diverse Muslim population and also to analyze the contradictory representations of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Spanish society. The symposium will bring together the leading scholars and activists working on Spanish Islam in both Spain and the United States. It will be divided into two panels: a morning panel on the topic of “Identities” and an afternoon panel on the topic of “Representations.”

This event is free and open to the public.

Symposium Schedule:

10:00 Morning refreshments

10:20 Welcome: Pauline Jones Luong

10:25 Opening remarks: Eric Calderwood

Morning panel: “Identities,” 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

10:30-11:15 Mounir Benjelloun Andaloussi Azhari

“The Reality of Spanish Islam: Diversity and Challenges”

11:15-12:00 Mariam Isabel Romero Arias

“Junta Islámica: A Human History”

12:00-12:30 Q&A and discussion

Afternoon panel: “Representations,” 2:00 PM – 6 PM

2:10 - 2:55 Avi Astor

“Governing Religious Diversity amid National Redefinition:

The Political Incorporation of Islam in Contemporary Spain”

3:00 - 3:45 Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar

“Visibility and Vulnerability in Spain’s ‘Muslim City’:

Historical Anxiety and the Politics of Minority Representation”

3:45 -4:15 Coffee Break

4:15 -5:00 José Antonio González Alcantud

“The Islamic-Berber Conquest of 711: Interpretations and

Representations in Contemporary Spain”

5:00 - 5:45 Open Discussion and Q&A

5:45 Closing Remarks

Speaker Bios:

Mounir Benjelloun Andaloussi Azhari is the President of the Islamic Commission of Spain (CIE) and the President of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities (FEERI). He was born in Casablanca (Morocco). He received his B.A. in economics from Hassan II University in Casablanca, and he has received post-graduate degrees in human rights from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and in Islamic studies from the Universidad Complutense de Valencia (Spain). He frequently appears in major Spanish media venues (TV, radio, and the press) as the primary representative of Spain’s Muslim community.

Miriam Isabel Romero Arias holds leadership positions in several important Spanish Muslim associations: she is the Director of the Halal Institute (Córdoba, Spain), a member of the Executive Committee of the Junta Islámica, and the Project Director for the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities (FEERI). She is also the Vice-President of the Citizen Platform Against Islamophobia. She participated in President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, held in Washington D.C. in 2010. She has also published and lectured widely on the topics of religious diversity and Islamophobia in Spain.

Avi Astor is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University and part of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration. He is interested in processes of identity formation and boundary-making in social contexts undergoing racial, ethnic, or religious diversification. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in August of 2011 after successfully defending his dissertation, Mobilizing against Mosques: The Origins of Opposition to Islamic Centers of Worship in Spain. His thesis examines the sources of divergent reactions to mosques in Catalonia and Madrid. His current research focuses on the governance of Islam, and religious diversity more generally, in Spain since its transition to democracy during the late 1970s.

Mikaela Rogozen-Soltarreceived her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2010. Since then, she has taught at Yale University and at Emory University, where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the interdisciplinary Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her work explores how Europe’s Muslim past continues to inform its present, despite common understandings of Europe as a Christian-turned-secular cultural space. She is currently finishing a book manuscript based on an ethnographic study of urban encounters between Muslim migrants, Muslim converts, and non-Muslims in southern Spain. Her work on Islam and multiculturalism in Spain has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Anthropological Quarterly.

José Antonio González Alcantudis a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada (Spain). He is the author of numerous articles and books on the representation of Muslims and Islam in contemporary Spanish culture, including Lo moro (2003). He is the founder and director of the journal Imago critica, and he is the director of the research group “Observatorio de Prospectiva Cultural” at the University of Granada.