Conversation: Rasheed Ghanoushi (Tunisia), Yassin Al Hajj Saleh and Amr Hamzawy (both Fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
In this conversation the Tunisian politician and thinker Rasheed Ghanoushi negotiates, together with his interlocutors Amr Hamzawy (Stanford University / Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) and Yassin Al Hajj Saleh (Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), the question of a consensus between islamic and liberal/secular thought and politics.
The conversation took place in Arabic and was initiated by the Ibn Rushd Foundation.
Rasheed Ghanoushi is the co-founder of the Tunisian Ennahdha Party and serves as its "intellectual leader". His Party won the Tunisian Constituent Assembly election in 2011 and formed together with two other parties the Troika Government. In the Ennahdha, Ghannouchi advocates a reformed Islam as well as democracy and the application of human rights in Tunisia, for his commitment he received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for the year 2014 in Berlin.
Amr Hamzawy is a Senior Researcher at Stanford University. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo. He is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. In the academic year of 2018/19, he is a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Yassin Al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian writer who has been living in exile for four years. He has been a political prisoner for 16 years in the 1980s and 1990s. He is the author of six books on Syria, prison, contemporary Islam, on culture as politics and the role of intellectuals. His last book, a collection of essays written during the period from 2011 and 2015, has been translated and published in English under the title The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, and published by Hurst in London in July 2017. Presently he is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
