CPD University Fellow Asghar Offers “Lessons from the Holy Wars”

CPD University Fellow Rob Asghar's most recent book, Lessons From the Holy Wars: A Pakistani-American Odyssey, is now available from publisher Wheatmark and other stores. Lessons from the Holy Wars combines personal stories and political analysis to address the interplay among various citizenries and governments within the so-called 'clash of civilizations.'

Asghar will discuss the book at an event scheduled for 7pm on February 10, 2010 in Room 240, Doheny Library, at the University of Southern California. For details, click here.

"As someone with a background in both conservative Islam and evangelical Christianity," Asghar says, "I came to find that the Western view of the clash of civilizations has been shaped by many American evangelicals' misunderstanding of their own New Testament worldview, and by the resulting pressures placed on American foreign policy and diplomacy. This led to a profound change in my own personal religious views, but it also led to my becoming an active commentator on cultural, religious and political issues."

Asghar says what he saw within American evangelicalism after 9/11 is not unlike what he saw among some Muslims in the greater Middle East, who distorted the Quranic worldview in order to promote hostility toward the West. And in both cases, he believes these distortions have been countered inadequately by timid theologians and preachers in both camps. His new book illustrates such issues by detailing the intersection of his own Pakistani-American family's narrative with the larger global narrative since 9/11.

"The victories that Asghar discusses here, involving acceptance and reconciliation among people who can feel deserted and betrayed by their closest kindred, are victories, I think, for our larger family of human societies as they grind up against one another each day in an era characterized by identity politics and partisan posturing" wrote Warren Bennis, Chairman of the University of Southern California's Leadership Institute.