Young Hearts Making an Impact: The Power of Volunteering

In our effort to present enriching and relevant topics that aims to inform, update and empower the local community, we hosted at the end of June a Muntada talk entitled “Islam in the 21st Century: Overcoming the Challenges of Extremism”. The talk, which was well received by the audience hosted three well-renowned speakers that shared their knowledge and insight about Islam today.

The first speaker, Shaikh Hamza Yusuf, is the President of Zaytuna College, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. He is also an advisor to Stanford University’s Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Recently, he was ranked as “the Western world’s most influential Islamic scholar” by The Muslim 500, edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. In his talk, Shaikh Hamza spoke about extremist pathology and remedy covering the five errors in Islan thought that extremists build their assumptions on.

Dr. Aref Ali Nayed, the second speaker is the Ambassador of Libya to the United Arab Emirates and is the Founder and Director of Kalam Research & Media and Chairman of the Libya Institute for Advanced Studies. During the Libyan revolution he was also the Chief Operations Manager of the Libya Stabilization Team. Dr Aref, explained Imam Zarruq’s five Guidelines of Muslim’s path.

The last speaker for this talk was Karima Bennoune. She is a celebrated author, lawyer & professor. A longtime human rights advocate and former Amnesty International advisor. Karima Bennoune is the author of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. Karima Bennoune throughout the talk spoke about stories of brave people who all faced extremism and defied it in their own ways.