FLORIDA TIMES UNION, June 29, 2009 UNF teacher will study Bangladesh culture for “common problems.”By Josh Salman Parvez Ahmed understands the importance of culture. The assistant (associate) finance professor at University of North Florida has worked hard to bridge the gap between the general population and Muslim community in Northeast Florida. He...

Published in Huffington Post. In Cairo, a U.S. President owned up to a well known fact that in 1953 the United States played a role in overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddeq, the then democratically elected leader of Iran. Over half a century later, following the botched 2009 Presidential elections in Iran, it is no longer America denying Iranians the right to be represented...

Media Relations & Events Press Release For: May 06, 2009 Dr. Parvez Ahmed, associate professor of finance in the Coggin College of Business at the University of North Florida, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture and conduct research at the Independent University of Bangladesh in Dhaka during the fall 2009 academic year. Ahmed, who speaks and...

The Huffington Post, May 8, 2009 The Justice Department has now found that the FBI’s terrorist watch list is flawed. Not only does the list consist of a mind-boggling 1.1 million names of 400,000 people, the Justice Department has also found that the FBI was “sometimes dangerously slow to add suspects to the nation’s terrorist watch list, and even slower to...

Huffington Post, April 14, 2009 During his recent visit to Turkey, President Obama spoke about the promise of a new era in Turkish-U.S. relationship that can serve as a “model partnership” between the West and the Muslim world. America’s quest to find a “model” Muslim partner is not new. In January 2008, then U.S. President George W....

Huffington Post, April 9, 2009 A week before Passover, a local interfaith group called the Table of Abraham organized a Seder event at Congregation Ahavath Chesed, a Reform Jewish congregation in Jacksonville. The goal was to enact all of the rituals that are part of Seder as a way of informing and teaching people who are unfamiliar with this tradition. Turning the...

Published in Today’s Zaman, April 5, 2009(Turkey’s largest circulating English daily) Long before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, people in Turkey had expressed a sentiment of hope about his presidency. Reporting for The New York Observer in January 2008, Suzy Hansen quoted Omer Taspınar, director...

Huffington Post, March 26, 2009 A recent headline on CNN read, “FBI planting spies in U.S. mosques,” Muslim groups allege. This outrage was sparked by revelations that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sent an agent provocateur into a mosque in southern California who was coercing worshippers in becoming informants and inciting them to make...

An edited version was first published in Fayetteville Observor on March 19, 2009 In January 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told Fox News that it severing its ties with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading American Muslim organization. A month later, I was surprised to see a FBI agent stop by my office in Jacksonville seeking...

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 17 March 2009 Jacksonville, Florida – The noted Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore said, “Music fills the infinite between two souls”. I experienced this while attending a recital by Choir Al Farah, a musical group that aims to highlight the reality and the possibility of Christians,...

Orginal Published in Islamic Horizons, Mar-Apr, 2009. The State of U.S. Economy On the verge of taking over the Presidency of the United States of America, Barack Obama described the U.S. economy as “very sick” with the situation “getting worse.” This worry is best reflected in the fact that U.S. unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent,...

Orginal Published in IslamOnline, March 4, 2009 On Tuesday Feb 17, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law $787 billion stimulus package, a measure he described as, “the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history.” Almost 38 percent of spending bill contains various tax-cuts to individuals and businesses with the remaining 62 percent...

http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/2945/ Recently I had a conversation with two officials from the US government. Among the many subjects of our conversation, one was about the circumstances that lead to my resignation from the helm of a major American Muslim organization. Despite my discomfort in having a conversation about things I had long forgotten about and moved...

Source: Common Ground News Service, 27 January 2009, www.commongroundnews.orgCopyright permission is granted for publication. Published in the Florida Times Union. Wed, Feb 4, 2009 In his first interview with Dubai-based Arabic TV network Al Arabiya, President Barack Obama connected with Muslim audiences, saying, “I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in...

This article appeared in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Islamic Horizons, Page 26. In December 1996, then Chairman of Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan said, “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions…?” Immediately after he said this, the stock market in Tokyo...