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The Crisis of Islamic Civilization by Ali Alawi |
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 The Open Discussion in collaboration with the Gulf Cultural Club, organised a lecture by Dr Ali Allawi to coincide with the launching of his new book “The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation”. It was held on Tuesday 14th April by the man who had served as Defence and Trade Minister in Post-Saddam Iraq. He delivered a personal account of his early life and how it had been influenced by Muslim and Western thinkers and activists in UK and USA. He described his upbringing in Iraq in the fifties and sixties, his experiences as a student in Washington as a student first at MIT and then Harvard, before obtaining his PhD in Cambridge.
His life was gradually transformed in the eighties as he finally found his salvage in the development of his inner faith within Islam. He briefly touched on his experience in government with a degree of bitterness at what he considered as un-Islamic behaviour by some “Islamists” when they held a political post. He insisted on the need to harmonise the inner and outer aspects of Muslims, and hinted that what he considers as a crisis within the Islamic Civilisation is the contradictions between the beliefs and practices of “Islamists” when they hold power |
