Sixteenth Annual Conference of The Association of Muslim Social Scientists

Abstract

The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) held its Sixteenth
Annual Conference at the ISNA headquarters in Plainfield, Indiana, October
9-11, 1987. Registration listed about 200 participants from the United States,
Canada, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Trinidad, and other countries. The
inaugural session on October 9 provided a hospitable setting for camaraderie.
Eloquent and spirited speeches by Iqbal Unus, Conference Chairman; lbrahim
Syed, AMSE Program Chairman; and Mushtaqur Rahman, AMSS Program
Chairman, set the stage for the conference and the sessions.
Chaired by Salahuddin Malik, AMSS Vice-president, the first session on
Political Science was held on Friday evening after Salat-ul Maghrib. Hashem
Al-Jaseem of the University of California was the first to present his paper
on Islam and Politics. He was followed by Taysir Nashif of Essex County
College, who pleaded for a Nuclear Free Zone in the Middle East. Louay
Safi of Wayne State University concluded the session with his presentation
of War and Peace in Islam.
This session was so lively and discussions so absorbing that no time was
left for the following session scheduled for the same evening. Conferees preferred
to postpone the second session rather than to conclude the discussions.
It was heartening that every conferee maintained the Islamic tradition of conducting
debates in a spirit of good humor, disagreeing without being
disagreeable.
The first full day of the conference, Saturday, October 10, began with a
Tilawat-e-Quran, and a session on Education. Chaired by M.A.W. Fakhri of
Chicago State University, the session had two presentations. Hakim Rashid
of Howard University opened the session with his paper on “SocializatiodEducation
of Muslim Children in America”. He was followed by Nimat
Hafez Barzangi of Cornell University, who presented her paper on “Perceptions
of the Islamic Belief System: The Muslims in North America. Following
the session on education, two concurrent sessions were held on Sociology
and History dealing with Muslim minorities. This was the first time the strategy
of concurrent sessions was ever tried in the AMSS. The sociology session
Chairperson, Ilyas Baynus of the State University of New York, first invited ...