UPenn Professor Rejects Islamic Supremacism

Amel Mili

At a conference in Washington, DC earlier this month, the University of Pennsylvania’s Amel Mili and a fellow Tunisian offered a refreshing rebuttal to the Islamic supremacist dogmas dominating Middle East studies. Andrew Harrod’s report for Campus Watch appears today at Jihad Watch:

“We don’t only want to be Muslim and eradicate anything before or after,” stated the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Arabic Language and Culture Program Director Amel Mili . . . [at] a small breakout panel at the Policy Studies Organization’s Middle East Dialogue 2017. Her lecture examining a 1982 Tunisian court decision denying a woman her inheritance on the basis of sharia law shed light on the difficulty of reinterpreting Islamic scriptures for the modern world.

During audience questioning, Mili focused on Tunisia’s uniquely cosmopolitan culture within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. “In Tunisia, so far, we have this global approach of history. I am happy, even if it was through colonization, that I had the chance, for example, to master the French language and the French culture.” In post-panel communications, she added that in Tunisian history, “French language bears the ideas of equality, democracy, human rights, etc.”

To read the entire article, please click here.
Cinnamon Stillwell analyzes Middle East studies academia in West Coast colleges and universities for Campus Watch. A San Francisco Bay Area native and graduate of San Francisco State University, she is a columnist, blogger, and social media analyst. Ms. Stillwell, a former contributing political columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written on a wide variety of topics, including the political atmosphere in American higher education, and has appeared as a guest on television and talk radio.
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