The Shia revival and politics in the Middle East

Vali Nasr, an expert on the Middle East and political Islam, will give a presentation titled "The Shia Revival and the Politics of Change in the Middle East" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 1, in Kresge Auditorium. The event, which is sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, is free and open to the public.

Nasr is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He has written several books, including Democracy in Iran (2006) and a bestseller, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (2006). He also is the author of The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (2001), Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (1996), and was an editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003). Nasr has written on political Islam and the comparative politics of South Asia and the Middle East for leading U.S. newspapers and academic journals.

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