Tag: Princeton University

The new wave of Moroccan immigrants in Spain, is young and better prepared

16 June 2012
The “new wave” of Moroccan immigrants arriving in Spain and in the rest of Europe are mostly young, most of them from upper-middle class, and with better qualifications, explained Douglas Massey, a demographer at Princeton University, USA.
Massey, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton and speaker of a seminar on Moroccan immigration organized by the University of Navarra, has highlighted the fact that Spain has already surpassed France as the country of destination for migrants from the North African country.
These young migrants, stressed the sociologist, are better trained, very different from the “peasant workers” who came to Spain from Morocco in recent decades, Massey also pointed out that in Canada and in the United States it is “clear” that these migrants are now “more qualified and more professional.”

Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves

Speaker: JOHN BOWEN, Chair, Social Thought and Analysis & Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis; 


Commentators: JOCELYNE CESARI, Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Director of Harvard’s Islam in the West Program; MARY LEWIS, History Department, Harvard University; AMY WALDMAN, “The Atlantic” and Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Sponsor: Social Exclusion and Inclusion in an Expanded Europe Study Group co-sponsored by the Islam in the West Lecture Series 

Location: Lower Level Conference Room

Contact Name: Hilary Silver, Jocelyne Cesari Contact Email: hsilver@email.brown.edu, sprevatt@hds.harvard.edu

Details: “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion of John Bowen’s Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space, Princeton University Press, 2007.

Interpreting the Islamic Tradition in the Contemporary World

All members of the Harvard community are cordially invited to attend the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program’s first annual conference entitled, “Interpreting the Islamic Tradition in the Contemporary World.” Events will be held on Saturday, November 3 and Sunday, November 4. The agenda for the conference events is below. The conference is free, including the lunch reception on November 3 and the Gamelan performance on November 4. The events will take place on the first floor of the Barker Center both days.

Saturday, November 3

9:30 am – 12:30 pm

  • Thompson Room, Barker Center
  • John Bowen, Washington University in Saint Louis: “Ibn Ashur in Aceh and Paris: Adapting Shar?`a by way of its Objectives”
  • Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University: “Religious Authority and the Language of Ijtihad in Contemporary Sunni Islam”
  • Asef Bayat, Leiden University: “Fun and Fundamentalism”

    • 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm Barker Center Middle Eastern lunch reception for members of the Harvard community

    2:00 pm to 5:00 pm Thompson Room, Barker Center

  • Said Arjomand, State University of New York-Stony Brook: “Islamic Constitutionalism: Paradoxes and Pitfalls in the Appropriation of the Islamicate Political Tradition”
  • Farid Esack, Harvard University: “Redeeming Islam: Constructing the Good Muslim Subject in Contemporary Religious Studies”
  • Omid Safi, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “Reforming Islam in the ’Axis of Evil’: Contesting Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran”

    • Sunday, November 4

    9:30 am – 12:30 pm Thompson Room, Barker Center

  • Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University: “Distinguishing Bigotry from Blasphemy in Contemporary Freedom of Speech Debates”
  • David Cook, Rice University: “Faith and Fornication: Behind the Murji’a Debate in Contemporary Islam”
  • Sherman Jackson, University of Michigan: “Ibn Taymya and Black Theodicy”

    • 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm

  • Barker Center Concluding remarks, closing reception
  • Performance by Boston Village Gamelan Group